Rocky Mountain Voices » Hardware

DirectPointe Provides Expert Remote Computer Support to Home Users

Brad Baldwin — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:29:07 +0000

DirectPointe, an award-winning managed service provider (MSP), has added a new home computer care service with its DirectPointe Home offering. Until now, computer service meant disassembly and transporting your computer into retail location where a “geek” would add your machine to a 10-day-wait queue. But DirectPoint Home changes the game with its remote expert support where users can get help 24×7x365, all without the hassle of disconnecting cords and cables.

DirectPointe Home provides three levels of service: PC Care, On-Demand and Total PC. PC Care is a preventative service that solves 80% of the most common computer problems by doing routine maintenance. On Demand provides fast support so that you can get your problem fixed now! Total PC is an unlimited package that provides everything a home computer user needs to have peace of mind when it comes to their computer, including virus protection, online security, data back-up and unlimited support.

Seth Bailey, VP of the Consumer Division at DirectPointe, talks to Brad Baldwin from Rocky Mountain Voices about the offering and the benefits for retiring baby boomers or parents hoping to find relief from their mal-ware downloading youngsters.

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Student Creates Multi-Touch Software and Table for Science Project

Brad Baldwin — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:16:29 +0000

Here’s one student that takes the “Science Fair” to the next level. Bridger Maxwell, a high school student at Utah County Academy of Sciences (UCAS) decided to create a multi-touch table for his Science Fair entry–kinda like an iPhone screen, and Microsoft Surface on a budget.

The multi-touch experience allows for object movement, rotation, growing and shrinking, and even multi-hand, multi-person use. Inspired by movies like Minority Report, Maxwell leverages Apple OS X, code developed during Google Summer of Code called Open Touch, and his own code–which he has submitted back to the community at http://code.google.com/p/corkboard/. The table, made from plexiglass and a dissembled Acer monitor, uses infrared light emitting diodes and an IR camera to detect and transmit fingertip motions as inputs.

Maxwell also expects to experience a future where multi-touch technology becomes a standard way to interact with applications, particularly for graphic manipulation and even gaming. While Maxwell didn’t get a summer internship on the iPhone team “this” year, he has received coverage on Ars Technica and the local NBC news station. Not bad for a high school student.

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Cymphonix Prioritizes Bandwidth for Web Content and Application Traffic

Brad Baldwin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:31:18 +0000

When small and medium-sized businesses or K-12s want to manage how their Internet bandwidth is being used, they turn to Cymphonix. On average, 50% of any Internet connection is used for browsing–some critical and necessary, and some not. The other 50% of any Internet connection is used for Internet applications. Voice over IP (VoIP) and database backups are essential. However, other applications may be non-critical, like peer-to-peer, streaming media and music downloads. Cymphonix’s Network Composer is an inline network appliance that provides a secure web gateway to manage both browsing and IP application activity.

Brent Nixon, President of Cymphonix, shares an overview of the company and discusses some of the key issues IT managers are worried about, including the emergence of web apps that anticipate near unlimited bandwidth. Rather than pay for more bandwidth, Cymphonix lets IT managers see the top bandwidth users, top sites visited, and real-time data activity and manage and filter traffic through static and dynamic port filtering.

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DirectPointe To Offer Managed Services to Consumers

Brad Baldwin — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:40:11 +0000

Michael Proper is the CEO and entrepreneurial vision for the fast-growing DirectPointe, a provider of managed computing services that make technology simple, manageable and affordable for small and midsize businesses. DirectPointe has established itself by offering great support to organizations who are looking for a partner to manage the technology they need to grow their business. DirectPointe manages the entire computing lifecycle, including procurement, deployment, management, protection and support, so customers have one company to handle all their computing needs–at a set monthly fee.

With a enterprise platform of services defined and running for small and medium businesses, Proper sees the opportunity to take these same computing services to the consumer market. By tapping into Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who have an existing relationship with customers, DirectPointe can offer their services as an add-on revenue product or through a private-label service.

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Cyrstal Clear Calls with ClearOne

Brad Baldwin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:06:50 +0000

ClearOne, a Salt Lake City-based company, holds a majority of the global market share in the professional audio conferencing systems category. It should come as no surprise that their conference phone products for the desktop and individuals wouldn’t include significant technology enhancements that set them apart from the “el’cheapo” models you see on eBay. With full-duplexing, noise canceling, noise reduction, high-quality microphones and industrial design to enhance a voice, ClearOne products pack the best in audio technology.

Brad Baldwin learns about ClearOne from Kurt Olsen during the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Olsen shows off the Chat 50, which lets the mobile executive place calls via her cellphone or plug into a laptop via USB for Skype or softphone use.

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How to Pack a 62 Inch Monitor in Your Briefcase

Brad Baldwin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:38:20 +0000

When you hit the road and can’t squeeze your 62 inch monitor into your briefcase, you may want to reach for your Vuzix iWear. So if you’re watching a movie on your laptop or iPod or looking to join multiple friends in a first-person shooter game, Vuzix delivers a big experience with a mobile form factor. For gamers, the glasses-like displays will provide video, audio, microphone and even 3D sensors that allow you to move an on-screen character’s field of view by moving your head.

Paul Travers, CEO of Vuzix, talks with Brad Baldwin from the show floor of 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) about the products and the awards they have received.

Specs for the Techie:

Virtual 62” screen viewed from 9-feet
Advanced Video Frame Buffers, allowing for up to four 62 inch virtual screens
iWear 3D Enabled for automatic 2D/3D control as well as field sequential 3D video files
Twin high-resolution 640×480 (920,000 pixels) LCD displays
Flicker free 3D video support for most field sequential 3D video files
32-degree field of view
24-bit true color (16 million colors)
60 Hz progressive scan update rate
Removable, integrated speakers
AccuTilt™ viewer with 15 degrees of angle
Console Video Splitter with NTSC, Component & HDMI video in and out

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Celio REDFLY: A Smartphone’s Mobile Companion

Brad Baldwin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:53:42 +0000

When Celio Corporation received a 2008 CES Innovations Award this past November, the news was out that Ceilo was up to something cool. Kirt Bailey, CEO of Celio Corporation — and former Intel Capital director involved with mobility markets, sat down with Brad Baldwin and shared the story of the REDFLY Mobile Companion.

As Bailey reminds, today’s smartphones are approaching (or already have) the processing power of computers. The REDFLY unleashes the mobile computing and communication power of today’s smartphone that is trapped beneath a tiny screen. The REDFLY is a 1″x6″x9″ clamshell device that connects to a smartphone via Bluetooh or USB to enhance a smartphone with an 8″ high-resolution display, full-function keyboard, touchpad and 8-hour battery life. The REDFLY also has a standard VGA port for output to projectors and displays and charges your phone while in use.

Bailey sees a big benefit for the mobile business traveler who seeks to stay connected while shedding pounds. REDFLY lets salespeople more easily use Salesforce.com or other Web 2.0 apps, allows business managers to forecast in Excel, or helps executives keep up on email — all from their their smartphone and the 1.9 pound REDFLY.

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Video Created with CodecSys Minimizes Bandwidth Needs

Brad Baldwin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:55:49 +0000

With Internet bandwidth demand doubling each year through 2010, broadcast media, IPTV, and new user-generated “YouTube-style” video are culprits exacerbating the problem. This is where Broadcast International and their new CodecSys offering can help reduce bandwidth for video application by 50-75%, including High Definition (HD).

For the lay person, digital video is created with a video codec that encodes and compresses a stream of information. There are numerous codecs, each offering its own benefit and/or tradeoffs for visual or audio quality and file size.

Unlike traditional systems that force a single codec, CodecSys runs each frame of video past a collection of the codecs and determines which codec is best for that particular frame or series of frames. Exploiting attributes of multiple codecs, CodecSys can reduce bandwidth needs by 50-75%. Since it’s a software solution, new codecs can easily be incorporated into the system. Cable providers, media companies, and new web or IPTV-based stations can benefit from the CodecSys offering.

Broadcast International CEO Rod Tiede talks with Brad Baldwin about CodecSys and their recent demo with IBM at the 2007 IBC Expo in Amsterdam on the new BladeCenter® QS20 “Cell Blade”.

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Larry Dalton on Photonics and Electro-Optics

Brad Baldwin — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:15:16 +0000

Dr. Larry Dalton, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the George B. Kauffman Professor of Chemistry & Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington and Nobel Prize nominee, talks about his work with polymers, photonics and electro-optics.

Electro-optics and photonics play an enormous role in our lives. However, people know little about them. As Dalton explains, “In the future, electro-optic technology could play a critical role in next generation defense, computer transportation, medicine, entertainment, information technology, communications and energy.”

Dalton’s research projects can be found at http://depts.washington.edu/eooptic.

This podcast is redistributed with permission from Lumera Corporation as part of their series on nanotechnology.

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Chris Johnson on Imaging’s Future in Medicine and Science

Brad Baldwin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:35:51 +0000

Chris R. Johnson directs the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah. Johnson was greatly influenced by several people responsible, in large part, for creating computer graphics as we know it today. Names like David Evans and Ivan Sutherland (Evans and Sutherland Computing), John Warnock (Adobe), Jim Kajiya (Microsoft), Ed Catmull (Pixar), and Nolan Bushnell (Atari) are all individuals with links to the University of Utah computer science programs.

Johnson talks about how imaging is transforming the medical and scientific industries, particularly to understand perhaps the most complex organism today: human life. With the hardware, software algorithms, and communications today, we’re entering what Johnson calls the Golden Age of medical and bioscience research. What is possible today, was only dreamed about just a few years ago. Through teamwork from computer scientists with medical experts, the result is breakthroughs in the way computers are being used to diagnosis conditions and apply medical treatments.

ZigBee’s Benefits for Home Automation

Brad Baldwin — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 05:32:46 +0000

Adding a home automation system to an existing home used to require tearing out drywall, installing thousands of feet of wire and surviving the battle of the mess and endless dust. John Yoon, VP of Marketing, and Wally Barnum, a technical lead at Control4, educate Brad Baldwin on the reasons ZigBee provides the right wireless standard for home automation. Aimed primarily at monitoring and control rather than data transfer, ZigBee filled an important role to interface wirelessly to lighting, climate, and other systems. Just like WiFi became a popular consumer brand to represent the IEEE 802.11 standard, ZigBee is the moniker for IEEE 802.15.4.

Home Automation Must Support Media PCs and Future Systems

Brad Baldwin — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:12:40 +0000

It’s more common than ever to use purpose-built hardware and software solutions, (Xbox, Firewalls and VPN appliances, Google Search appliance, etc.). John Yoon, VP of Marketing, and Bill Harper, Director of Development at Control4, discuss the advantages to a home automation controller and accompanying lighting, climate, and media solutions. The PC is certainly an important component to the digital home. Including Media Center PCs, iPods, and Apple TVs and future systems through standards-based integration allows the home owner to deploy the best solution today and still support future components and digital accessories in the home tomorrow.

Solara Networks: How to Tivo IP Traffic

Brad Baldwin — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:39:03 +0000

Tivo changed the way we watch TV. Just like you record your favorite 24 episode, Solera Networks offers a network security solution for enterprises and governments that captures and replays an organization’s network traffic. Steve Shillingford, VP of Worldwide Sales, sits down with Brad Baldwin and talks about how customers are using Solera Networks’ software and network appliance to capture and store IP traffic at up to 4.3 gigabits per second.

Since all network traffic is recorded, it’s easy for the IT staff to review exactly what passed through specific ports or reconstructing a specific user’s browser session. With the Solera solution, the answer to “why” the network was slow between 2:00 and 4:00 PM yesterday can be scientific instead of guesswork. Compliance managers, universities, and governments can ensure that policies are followed and that intellectual assets and intelligence are preserved. Built on an 100 percent open architecture, any available commercial, open source, or customized software can be used to review data. Solera also offers tools and APIs for any third party or individual to create custom tools for monitoring and review.

Newly backed by Canopy Ventures, Solera Networks takes a new infusion of cash to get the news out about their customer-proven offering.

Skullcandy Links Cell Calls and Music

Brad Baldwin — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:00:51 +0000

Rick Alden, CEO and founder of Skullcandy, created a lifestlye technology brand that integrates cell phone and audio switching so the active lifestyle can easily switch from tunes to voice calls. The patented Skullcandy Link(TM) is available in Skullcandy-branded products and is also integrated into Giro helmets, Camelback packs, Burton headwear, Sessions snowboard clothing, and more. Rick’s 15 years of snowboard event and protour planning allowed him to understand the psychographics of the Skullcandy target customer and create an authentic alternative and lifestyle brand. Alden discusses how the company name was created out of a need for a memorable web domain.

Skullcandy hosted Supernatural as a booth attraction at CES. Supernatural holds the world’s record for the longest a freestyle rap at over nine hours. Check out the video of Supernatural working the CES crowd and CEO Alden rocking with the crowd.

Control4 Talks About Enabling Remote Access to Your Automated, IP-Based Home

Brad Baldwin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 07:10:19 +0000

Ed Ryan, Vice President of Product Marketing, and Fred Geiger, Product Manager, at Control4 talk about their 4Sight service. 4Sight enables remote access to your home via the web so it’s easier to interact with the automated features of your home. They talked to us about how you can lock down your Wii to only work from 5-7pm and how you can set alerts if your garage door is still open past 10:00 am. And your Contol4 dealer can remotely interact with and customize your home features. Today there are over 10k IP-based automated homes, and Control4 is leading the way by enabling the everyday homeowner to have a smart home.