Futuristic

You must have instances in your daily life when you wanted to find some word on a newspaper page or a long handwritten or printed page. It also becomes a big problem for daily book readers when they want to find some line on a page as there is no soft-copy available. Similar is the case with images on a newspaper (video surface scan, I will cover later).

The idea is to manufacture a surface scanning tool which you can use by placing it on a paper(lets say newspaper) and then turn it on, so that it can start the scan. It will provide the user an interactive experience with paper objects (newspaper, magazines, books, etc.). User can search the word on a paper instantly.

The tool will have a transparent glass surface so that the reader can still see through (optional).

And, then Voila! you will get the interactive paper or image in your hands.

You can make this tool a wireless enabled device, so that it syncs with the online information about the (scanned) search keyword or magazine image.

Although Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle and similar other products provide an alternate way for book reading, but this is just amazing. 99% of readers like to read from paper and maybe 1% of people are using above machines. But this can certainly make a difference in paper reading.

Here is the “SmartSurfer” showcase image:

Text search with scanner.Surface Scan Tool

Take the case of videos on YouTube. Today’s videos are tagged with only important information that the video up-loader mentions while uploading a video. But this kind of service do NOT need any user to tag information explicitly (well its optional). The service recognizes the audio (speech) pattern and converts it into text and stores the information in a semantic database. It will make the video search even more tangible, effective, and concrete to the user than it is today. The user can search within the video for a particular word or text which was spoken at a certain instance of time. This feature has recently been introduced by Google in the form of Youtube Videos Captioning and the content search is enabled in Advanced Search options. Well, anyway, this can also enable the video streaming servers to give control of streaming to the user as well, hence saving their cost of streaming the whole video and the user can play the video only at specified points in video. It will help solve the problem of efficiently finding the video on the search engine (video host) AND to find the content with-in the video.

Illustration of the concept is shown below, here the keyword “weather” is shown to exist at different seek positions in the video content.

Video Content Search - Speech Recognized Text is Indexed with its location inside the video

Let’s take a short scenario: The video of some conference is 1:00 hrs long and it discusses the topic of “Marketing” at some instant that people don’t already know that where it is discussed. So, he has to almost see the whole video to find out. Also, there is a problem of extra video streaming that will be done by the video server (which can be saved, if the user is only interested in a particular span of time within a video)

Below is just a ‘casual’ comparison of run length of pico/pocket size (or call it handheld) projectors. It is not a hidden truth that battery life in miniature devices is a big problem for electronics manufacturers but now when the PC age is getting expired, iPhone type mobiles are becoming an integral part of computer culture. The inheritance of computer functionality in mobile phones has gained trend but it will take time to become a sustainable product. Battery life is crucial to everything.

Few Pico Projectors with Battery Life

(comparison may vary on different settings, below is the most casual observations taken from their websites)

1. Optoma PK101 Pico Projector: 90 minutes
2. Aaxa P1 Pico Projector LCoS Hand-Held Micro Projector: 45 to 60 minutes
   
3. Microvision showcase Pico Projector: 2 hours 30 minutes
   
4. BeamBox Evolution R1 Pico-Projector: 1 hour 13 minutes
5. Apolco P3 Micro / Pico Projector: 40 minutes
6. Samsung MBP200: 2 hours 40 minutes
7. LG shows off HS102 DLP mobile projector: ~2 hours
8. Dell’s M109S pocket projector: 1 hour 20minutes
9. LG HS102 Pocket Projector: -don’t know-

The shift from PC to Laptop, in the past 5-10 years,  was rather swift and everybody feels comfortable with it. Now, everyone who owns a computer also tends to buy a laptop as well. Today, we can see tiny laptops that are almost equal to 15inch length. This miniaturization of laptop has created a new market for projectors’ industry.  The problem is, you dont want to watch a movie in a tiny laptop with 12 inch screen. You still need a big screen.

Apart from tiny screens, ‘Battery Life’ for pico projectors is not going to be solved in a near future but atleast when everyone has a laptop, manufacurers can bring the two together to present a good looking sophisticated laptop.

The idea is to embed projectors in your laptop to make your life more comfortable for entertainment and official-business purposes.

Consider this, your team is going on a car to a remote clients’ office to give a presentation. The route is too long, and you planned to watch a movie on your way (forgetting that you also have to give the presentation through your pico/pocket projector as well). The battery is consumed, lets say, 70%; now what do you want to do. Would you feel comfortable using it for the presentation (when the presentation is heavy and it might also includes some video clips). May be ‘NO’. So, what to do?

What I want to suggest is rather not as attractive as hand held pico projectors, or dual pico projectors in mobile handhelds (related post Mobile Phones Unleashed), but an embedded projector with laptops. The advantage is the extra space we can adapt for higher battery consumption and flexibility to use a laptop for entertainment/work or in corporate environment.

Another concept pic

Comments are most welcome.

Trust me, may be not, most of the drop outs are really worth “drop-out”. Its the natures’ calling to do what you are not supposed to do. Is it the way nature works? I am perplexed, yet excited. Juxtaposing a dozen of famous Entrepreneurs with a whole lot of students who actually drop out every year, I am left with no choice to understand them; understand them clearly! Before I compare the nill people with people who are comparable to null. Lets see our ‘genuine-drop-outs‘, Bill Gates dropped out from Harvard and built a company unmatchable to none, Microsoft. Steve Jobs dropped out from Reed College, as a high school student. He was 21 when he started the Apple company from his garage. Einstein although he failed in exam and dropped out from high school but his scenario was different, though he did PhD and won Noble prize as well. Mark Zuckerberg another Harvard drop out. Who doesn’t know Facebook that he created while living in his dorm room; which spreaded like a wild fire in a couple of years after its launch. Michael Dell dropped out from UT Austin, a PC freak, built the multinational company ‘DELL’ purely based on his entrepreneurial instincts and interest in computers. Ted Turner Do you know the first 24-hour cable news channel, its CNN, and he was the founder. Dropped out from Brown university but it was worth it – atleast for him. William Hanna You must have heard or enjoyed the famous cartoons like ‘Scooby-Doo’, ‘The Flintstones’, or ‘The Jetsons’ and so on. William Hanna co-founded the company “Hanna-Barbara” with ‘Joseph Barbera’. He dropped out from college because of un-wanted circumstances (i.e. Great Depression of 1929) but good for him as he paved his way towards success nevertheless. Thomas Edison inventor of bulb William Shakespeare Walt Disney Abraham Lincoln … Lets take a break here as the list can grow bigger and bigger, and mentioning all the famous drop outs is not the purpose.

Why I need to be dropped out? is my question. Well, to be honest, this question might confuse people like me, who wants to follow the path to success, while getting inspiration from the people I just mentioned above. Do they (the people above) really got the substance which proper education cannot fulfill. Proper education only gives you or makes you think in a proper direction. Someone said, real success is in making new paths instead of following successful paths. The sentence is apparent in the character of the people (above) who most certainly changed our life in one way or the other. If I want to be a successful ‘entrepreneur’, I don’t need to get dropped out unless my current state lends me all the time to complete my education. If I still drop out and don’t become a famous figure, I would join the failed majority and keep asking from God for the next life so that I can think different in the time I have given and get dropped out in a positive sense!

Is it a secretive path to success or a coincidence? Does God gives this path to every one and we just have to find it! One wonders, why they didnt completed the education, became regular eligible graduates, and than started establishing what they established later on at their immature time. But things just click once, all they did was to capture that moment. Someone said, fortunate are those who got the moment and were ready and unfortunate are those who also got the moment but were not ready. Here, ‘ready‘ means ‘ready to make a difference’ or ‘do some thing’ . To be ready or not, is not out of the world. The proper discourse of education brings a person to be ready to any moment he is capable of. Even, doing beyond what you can do or learnt of is neither luck nor fortune, its fate. Sometimes it’s beneficial and sometimes it’s not.

Reaching to the few final words…

I just want that moment and capture it where I can make some difference or change – not the change that Obama speaks of – but the one that realizes in me the true hidden potential that was unseen of previously or maybe it was blanketed under the  blind following of norms that restricted me to think apart.

In conclusion, it is a path to success! who really know what the path is.

I was wondering if there would be one job in which I would be adept in and can make a difference, it would be watching youtube videos. And guess what, I just got a call from ‘a’ company to be interviewed as an employee for watching youtube videos.

When I was called to appear for the interview the next friday; I was fully confident, I even ‘practiced’, YES! practiced by watching a couple of hundred more youtube videos. I appeared for the interview 30 minutes before the actual time. I did shave, cleaned shoes, combed the hairs, even worn a tie as well. Even after so much, I was thinking how come someone can get rejection. Anyway, sitting at the edge of my chair, looking time and again to the lady at the counter, I waited and keep thinking about the best and worst videos I have seen. I remembered, have I seen around 10K youtube videos in the recent months, Yes! I guess. It should not be a proud stunt to watch videos online but I was feeling proud of it as it made me attractive for a new kind of job whose market doesn’t even exist. Now the time had come. I was called, I avoided any dramatic entrance, stood calmly, shook hand and settled perfectly on my seat right in front of 3 bowled head persons. The whole video collection I had stored, started revolving around my forehead like I am in some cartoon and got banged with a violin on my head.

The person in the middle said: Which is your favorite youtube video ? Alot of answers were in my mind obviously! I wanted to tell all my favorites but No, as it was a critical situation so I slided down one puzzling answer towards them but smartly. He asked, can you help us tell what is the trend of youtube videos in a particular field. I said Yes Sir, thats what I am looking for. He explained, we are working on some product and we want to trace the development of similar products in the market. He added, we think that every new product is showcased and marketed as an idea or final-product at youtube so why not have a person telling us, whats going on. I said, No Problemo!. The other man asked, how can we guage your performance? Now, that was a trick question. I replied, sure you can. You just need to hire another person whether I am watching youtube or not. I even, proposed few names who can do the job.

Next day, they hired me with my friend.

Concept – The idea is to escape the physical boundaries. As the mobile phone operating systems are getting more powerful day by day, so are the display technologies. Monitors and keyboards will be removed from the computers. Wireless devices will also play the key role.

Here, the dual projector mobile phone is illustrated.

mobile computer with dual projector

Mobile computer with dual projector