Monday, January 9, 2012

Blog

What happens at CES in Vegas ... goes here

By Rodney H. Brown

It looks like there are a lot of local announcements coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, as well as the concurrent and conjoined AT&T Developer Summit also in Sin City. This will attempt to be a running blog aggregating the announcements that come from New England tech companies.

Jan. 11, 2012

The split heart necklace of the secure data world, iTwin Inc. of Singapore and Boston, took advantage of CES to announce that its secure USB data sharing devices now support multiple users being able to access the data. The iTwin product itself is pretty neat – plug one of the conjoined USB devices into your PC, set it up, then break off the back half (no ‘breaking’ actually required, as the device is designed to split in two) and whatever PC you connect the back half to can send and receive files securely with the first PC just by dragging them into what looks to your desktop like a standard removable USB flash drive. Sharing your porn — or those diplomatic cables for Wikipedia — was never easier!

Mobile Monitor Technologies LLC of Newton took advantage of the show that up until this year had always run concurrently with the Adult Entertainment Expo (I’m guessing massive target demo overlap) to show off its, well, mobile monitors. The lack of a completely incomprehensible butchered tech name aside, Mobile Monitor has products that allow you to add an extra screen to your mobile device, be it a netbook, tablet or smartphone. The idea is to give travelling businesspeople an affordable screen big enough to show off those awesome presentations the graphics department made without having to schlep around a full laptop all the time.

And to catch up on one I missed earlier this week, Cambridge Consultants, a technology design and development company with headquarters in Cambridge, UK, and Cambridge, Mass., was showing off the new Talk 2 and Play 2 Bluetooth car kits it had created for Armour Automotive. More than just wireless speakers, these kits allow an aftermarket installation of a dash-mount display screen and a controller device that will connect to multiple Bluetooth devices and allow them to operate simultaneously. So, if your music is on an iPod still but your phone is Android based, once you pair them with the Talk 2 and Play 2 kits, you can be listening to music, and if a call comes in on the phone, the kit will automatically pause the music playback and allow you to use the kit as a handsfree phone. Pretty handy for updating that windowless 1970s Ford van you drive around in.

Jan. 10, 2012

TomTom NV, the Dutch navigation tech company that has its U.S. headquarters in Concord, announced a metric ton of new products and new deals at CES, but the two deals that stand out are with Samsung and Fisker Automotive. The Samsung deal has TomTom adding maps and location content to the new Wave3 smartphone, which eschews any flavor of Android or Windows Phone7 for the Bada OS. In the Fisker deal, the California maker of electric cars has picked TomTom to provide Fisker cars with map and location content covering North America as well as Europe, through the cars’ Command Centers. The licensing deals cover three years, the companies said. One assumes that it comes with Ed Begley Jr.’s voice telling you when and where to turn, and how to be a good steward of the Earth.

Nuance continues with the nuanced tidal wave of announcements. The newest includes a ten-year strategic partnership with Gracenote to bring its voice recognition and natural language tech to Gracenote’s MediaVOCS database of phonetic transcriptions of artist names, albums and music genres, as well as movie and TV metadata. But the real kicker is Nuance’s swipe straight at Siri’s throat, with its new Go! app for Android that allows you to do natural language voice searches of dozens of informational websites. Go! has been running on Apple Inc.’s iOS since July, but undoubtedly got kicked to the curb when Siri showed up.

Getting all geeky with their announcement is SeaChange International Inc. of Acton, which has been chosen by set-top box maker Humax (sounds like a Dr. Suess character, I know) to provide its Nucleus Hybrid Gateway software and Nitro applications suite to Humax Co. Ltd.’s new tru2way set-top box, which will act as a home media gateway in addition to changing your cable channels.  Next up for SeaChange might be a licensing deal for arboreal video boxes with the Lorax (who speaks for the trees, you know).

And as I mentioned last week, Brass Monkey Inc. took the relaxing time before CES (that’s called sarcasm, son) to announce a shift in its business model and the close of its first funding round. All the while it was preparing to show off its new web portal through which users can play games on their smartphone – using it as the controller – after downloading a free app, at both the Verizon Wireless and Alcatel-Lucent booths. Using a 4G LTE Verizon phone, players connect to the game portal at playbrassmonkey.com and control the game being shown on a 42-inch touch-enabled tabletop called the GameTime Media Table, run by Alcatel-Lucent’s ng Connect Program and the MediaTile Co.

Jan. 9, 2012

Nuance Communications Inc. blasted strong out of the gate, with its announcement of the new Dragon TV product, making an early play at being the provider of natural language processing software for the nascent market that includes the rumored Apple TV and GoogleTV. Dragon TV is a voice and natural language processing software aimed at makers of TVs, set-top boxes, video game consoles and other devices, as well as cable service operators. In addition to the Mass High Tech brief, the website The Verge has a good short description of the new feature for couch potatoes that find lifting a remote too strenuous.

Sticking with the Burlington-based voice recognition company, Nuance announced at Intel Corp.’s press event Monday that it would be teaming up with the chipmaking giant to bring voice command and control to the ultra-light laptops Intel is trying to brand as Ultrabooks. The Dragon voice recognition technology will be deeply embedded into an application for laptop voice control that Intel is developing, according to a release the companies put out. I’ll only use it if I can get a command to execute by saying “Engage!”

Straight outta Milford comes dbx-tv, a subsidiary of THAT Corp. (seriously, I’m not making this up) which announced its product Total Cal, an “audio measurement and calibration tool that custom-optimizes sound quality from TVs.” Run from a PC, the idea is for an easy way to balance the multi-channel sound coming out of today’s tech-loaded TVs for the best sound quality in a given environment, like our expansive newsroom or my little living room.

Around the corner at the AT&T Summit, Foxborough’s Axeda Corp. continues on its path to bring about the invention of SkyNet and the coming robot apocalypse. Well, that may be a side effect. Teaming up with AT&T, Axeda’s machine-to-machine connection platform will be integrated into the AT&T M2M Application Platform, now ungainly labeled the AT&T M2M Application Platform Powered by Axeda. The idea is to use AT&T’s nationwide wireless network to connect various smart devices through Axeda’s cloud-based M2M connectivity, applications and development services offerings. Thanks a bunch, Axeda and AT&T, for helping make the smart M2M grid self-aware sooner rather than later, something I’ve already expressed concern over. Where is John Connor when you need him?

Less potentially world-ending is the news from Apperian Inc. which, in less than a year since shifting its focus to being a mobile management platform company from an app maker, has been picked by AT&T to provide the guts for its new mobile application management solution. Apperian’s EASE product will be at the heart of the new AT&T offering. The two companies have been working together for a number of years, with Apperian making apps for AT&T clients, but AT&T felt it was time to get into the management space with a product that will be labeled as AT&T Mobile Application Management “Powered by Apperian (and EASE).” I am seeing a pattern of ungainliness here, AT&T.

Stay tuned for daily updates as more local tech companies get their 15 minutes in the city that Wayne Newton built.