The man with his head in the clouds...
A German boffin is not happy with just making electronic gadgets very precise, he also wants to harness the power of the cloud to make them a bit smarter.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, who gave the world the MP3 player is backing Perfect Stream technology that lets computing power in the Internet "cloud" do the thinking for simple gadgets.
Brandenburg told AFP he thought those Perfect Stream guys were "just crazy" and having a laugh, but he likes "crazy" because people said the MP3 was "crazy" too.
Perfect Stream's idea is to have digital video and audio tailored to individual tastes and delivered as a service to essentially any gizmo that can talk to the Internet. It has been trialed successfully in Germany and the company was at CES to license the technology to Internet service providers in the United States.
A gadget can be programmed with a person's preferred shows, news sources, music, Twitter feeds, or other Internet content, and the data can be routed to digital picture frames, in-car navigation systems, feature phones, game consoles and more.
Apparently personalised Internet streams can be directed to everything from clever online electronics to the daftest $US50 phone with prepaid plans.
At the heart of the technology is processing digital content on servers "in the cloud" and then feeding it to gadgets that need only receive and decode the data.
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Issue: 133 | February, 2012