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Liquidbox

Media content creator application for magazines or web. Whether your goal is to update your portfolio, launch a themed magazine or a web-site this application could be something for you. It is a native web-application that offers a design-framework of HTML5 that allows importing and testing with various sources of content. It is not directly “drag and drop” web-design - but almost.

Liquidbox operates on AWS (amazon web services), a scalable platform in the cloud that lets many users work at a project at the same time and follow the progress in real time.

This cross-platform magazine maker makes content creation for the web easy. There are many pain-points addressed in the application that will have major appeal towards web-designers and graphic artists that work with heavy programs and need to quickly come up with models. Liquidbox makes playing around with Adobes programs and the text-editor for the source-code almost old fashioned. The founder Jani Hiltunens (currently 36years old) background comes from the basketball fields in Finland where he played as a professional for 10 years, to studies in design and finally an entrepreneur.

The idea at first was a form of a digital catalogue and a magazine maker. In the user-interface which is very user-friendly we find a familiar navigation language for anyone who has experience of Dropbox, Trello, Wix or Powerpoint. Jani described a couple key moments in his journey from idea to creation and highlighted two moments. Jani was working with some CMS (content management systems) and wanted to come up with a simpler one. Why? because this was back in 2012-2013 when the word cross-application was new and trendy. Jani then understood that social medias are paving a way of building content and sharing it, and the tools of creating and posting ones own content were lacking. You need to be a web-professional to manage so many languages and interfaces from ideation to creation.

Liquidbox allows the user to crop, size and arrange pictures in an inter-active grid-system. Copy-paste your text or embed videos directly into the application and launch. The competative edge against competitors such as Adobes InDesign, Mag+, Ceros.com or Issuu.com is scarily effective. When talking about value for the end user the freemium alternative competes in usability with some software that peaks at 5000e a year. Also, someone said that time is valuable, and this application is made to streamline the workflow of the print industry - with Liquidbox a hobbyist can produce content on demand as fast as a print-professional. Will be interesting what the future brings for Liquidbox. Let’s wish them good luck in representing Finnish know-how and a prosperous future.

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Game engines paving way for virtual reality

When looking at the advancement in computer graphics it is astounding how far the developing community has reached in only the lasrt few years. The cross-platform era has sparked the audio/visual industry.

Game engines, what they do is, render meshes a matrix of points) to vertices (dots connected by lines to form a shape) which in turn form to polygons which in the end product become textures. The smaller interconnected vertices, the better graphics, but also more computing power needed to display, especially in real-time games. It is an advancement following the Moore's law of technological evolution.

In the last three years major game engines has been Unity5, Cry-Engine, Unreal5 to name a few, there might be a disruption in this field coming.

With sensors reading the environment in real-time your machine will be able to apply layers of various designs into the users surroundings.

Alongside with the explosion of the mobile market, the gaming industry has been forced not to ignore the enormous market. Which in turn has led to a switch in developer philosophy from making the polygons smaller and smaller approach, to a thought of trying to re-build the virtual environments into atoms, just as in real life. In the process not eliminating, but drastically reducing the need of high computing capacity driven hardware. A response to the requirements from now a majority of the market.

A disrupting technology in this field is Euclideon, a technology company who are able to remove all limits surrounding the amount of 3D data that you can capture, visualize and interact with. 3D visualization and rendering are no longer reliable on expensive fast hardware with large amounts of RAM. It is a 3D search algorithm that can render unlimited quantities of point cloud data in real-time. The algorithm efficiency takes only one point for every screen pixel which means it can display models of previously unimaginable sizes at interactive frame-rates without the need for powerful CPU or GPU. We are reaching an end of polymer graphics, the next step is to recreate atoms into computer visualizations. Imagine a landscape stretched out to the horizon yet where you can zoom in on individual pieces of material scattered in your environment within a second. The word game-engine might have to get a new name when the big boys step up the competitive game. Unlimited point-cloud data visualized in real-time. Let that sink in and your imagination flow, the thing is that every day that eclipses the parts of hardware get smaller and cheaper, will be interesting to see what visualizations comes out from it.

CASE Solu

Cloud computing promises several attractive benefits for businesses and end users. Three of the main benefits of cloud computing include:

• Self-service provisioning: End users can spin up computing resources for almost any type of workload on-demand. • Elasticity: Companies can scale up as computing needs increase and then scale down again as demands decrease. • Pay per use: Computing resources are measured at a granular level, allowing users to pay only for the resources and workloads they use.

"In the public cloud model, a third-party provider delivers the cloud service over the Internet. Public cloud services are sold on-demand. Customers only pay for the CPU cycles, storage or bandwidth they consume. Leading public cloud providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM/SoftLayer and Google Compute Engine." - Techtarget.

The definition provided by the open community for cloud computing is the following:

"the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. Cloud computing services can be private, public or hybrids."

The Solu

Solu is a project on Kickstarter, with a deadline for 15th of November 2015. During its first day it raised half of its end goal of 200 000 USD.

Not only is Solu the first entirely cloud-based computer with a cloud-based OS, but also the smallest computer ever created. The cloud OS is unlike anything seen before, utilizing a mind-maplike UI which is described in the kickstarter campign as a step towards a new computer philosophy which supports project based workflow and helps with keeping materials for different projects easily organized with the biological-like UI. Solu has a new way of establishing a relationship between humans and machine, in the OS there is no windows, toolbars or icons. Rather project based action-areas.

Solu operates on four layers of hierarchy consisting of the Solu cloud, Solu hardware, the Solu OS and finally individual applications, tools and content. Since the whole Solu ecosystem is interconnected, it synchs itself when connected to the internet, but also allows the user to work offline. Android applications are supported.

The company behind Solu also tries to disrupt the established business model for software by introducing subscription fees on a monthly basis. Which means you pay for what you use and the money goes to developers. This in turn leads to continuously updating and developed applications based on feedback from the customer. This model might pave the way for personal in-app UIs. The customer only pay for the computer-parts costing around 350 dollars (no service or margin costs) and a monthly subscription fee of 20 dollars more which goes to improve the applications. Solu is made in the home-country of MySQL and Linux, yes its Finnish. Solu was launched for the public in San Francisco 22.10.2015.

CASE Soli

Soli is an antenna array and a micro-radar chip the size of a sim-card. It utilizes radar, ultra-wide band and millimeter radio-frequency waves. What it does is it captures the subtle hand movements with extreme precision, unlike any technology in the same size-category.

What ATAP is trying to do is to offer a seamless UI for wearables and emerging IoT ecosystems. What is so disrupting with this little device is that it open up possibilities for wearable 3D-environment interaction on micro-level, and makes the user the UI with precision less than millimeters. Soli will be developed for Android.

Since Soli reads radio-signals as low as 60GHz, it is capable of reading small and precise motions, and really capture the diversity of a hand, and apply the signals to the virtual world. With only basic interfaces we can simulate scroll, swipe, roll, pitch, yaw and grab which would be enough to simulate actions as well virtually as most real life maneuvers we do with our hand. According to ATAP the chip is made to scale and should ship out early 2016.

Thanks to Manchester University and BGT Materials we might get this little device at low cost, since

it is using compressed graphene ink (low cost material), which basically are two dimensional layers of carbon with high conductivity optimal for signaling. It's proven effective for use in radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) and other wireless sensors.

It is rumored that the German company Infineon also are making 60Ghz sensors to scale, with similar goals of implementation in system solutions, applications for automotive safety, industrial and commercial sensing and machine vision applications. Drones and robotics likewise as 3D maneuvering are on the rise with this little chip that gives us finger precision control.

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CASE Hololens

Microsoft Hololens is the worlds first holographic computer. Hololens is a good status quo example since it operates on its own familiar operating system (windows 10) which gives predominant picture of how a end-product should, would and could function.

Also it is a head mounted display (HMD) with a holographic processing unit (HPU) and visualizes content in three dimensions, introducing depth into computing. This device is also portable and mobile. Even though the device is quite big and not yet developed for full-round consumer use, it serves a point in displaying computing in 3D.

The Hololens will ship out on markets in the first quarter of 2016 to selected developers for the price of 3000 dollars per unit according to Techadars Hololens review. This price is about ten-fold compared to HTCs vive VR platform and the Oculus Rift VR with price-tags of around 350 dollars. But then again, they are niche devices while the Hololens is an all-performing platform.

Functions added to the Hololens since its first press reveal in July 2015 are gaze, gesture and voice command, spatial sound, spatial mapping and the ability to pick up and move virtual objects. Spatial sound environments reacts to where the user is and where the sound-source comes from, taking sound-recognition to a new level in context of immersion and inter-actability. The Hololens also uses a real time physics simulator which makes objects act as real world objects with mass which reacts to the users input. Gesture control is provided by the familiar Windows Kinect.

According to Michelle Fitzsimmons 6.Oct 2015, reporter for Techradar USA, the gesture control was hardest to execute with lag, delay and reading wrong commands. Also, the gesture control is limited to using only one finger which limits the usability to the level of a Surface laptop. Michelle also points out that the demonstrations on their keynote was the crème de la crème of applications, and base functions does not follow the same standards of quality as showcased at the event (October Keynote). The revolutionary thing with Hololens is that it truly disrupts the technology market and provide an ideal for a new era of computing, the possibilities are there.

There is no finite numbers regarding cost or battery life, but the potential for such a product is infinite and might very well live up to its potential. When talking about gaming, it is a go for Hololens. After all it is a full blown Windows 10 with holographic capabilities. Rumours say Halo 5 will be launched for Hololens, no date yet announced.

Hololens APIs will be made available with Windows 10 gaming SDK.

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Digital Citizenships

Handling your citizenship from one omnipotent platform that already knows the user which in itself frees the user from taking unnecessary steps in the process of doing a task online. This is nothing new, but taking it to the next step in a way by having the machine knowing intimate information about the user and utilizing it in a more advanced way as in the present, this I will try to describe in the following.

A digital platform containing your official identity, requires no registering but does the identification process in the background. Knowing this the platform would navigate effortlessly over the web. Other information could be displayed publicly for others to see, such as what languages you speak, general interests or if you are currently available.

Your identification, payment methods and shipment home would become a step which is an autonomous process when performing tasks over the web. With a proper e-citizenship pass, voting and societal duty-handling wouldn’t have to be something one would need to take off time to do, but instantly perform and get it over with. From voting to renewing your insurance or getting direct relevant information that concerns the individual and not target groups will most likely be presented with the wave of MR gadgets as well.

In Estonia a step towards digital citizenship models has already taken place.

This would free a citizenship to do what really matters when needed, instead of applying and wait for decision making. Imagine political decision-making which is today somewhat struggling to keep up with the pace that the fast digital societies operate. Personal belief is that the third navigational dimension will kill tab-windows and offer a new approach to browsing. A belief based on the fact that once a web-page is loaded – all the information is there since it is static and will stay available until further action.

One day politics maybe is operated from a digital platform provided from a proper infrastructure. It is a big change and might take some time to integrate as a working model. Big data is going to be a political issue and strength, both making it easier to find the target group and showcase the issue and deliver a visualized solution, to get feedback or other alternatives through a fast direct communication link. Mostly it will help solve local issues with local solutions and find the resources for it much faster than by todays models.

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