Gesture Control Demo

One of the nice things about visiting clients is getting a glimpse of new technology that will be showing up soon in our offices or our living rooms.

Case in point: Here's a demo of a gesture control system that uses stereo vision to detect people and objects at 60 fps. The TYZX G3 Embedded Vision—that's the small white camera mounted above the flat-panel display—enables a user to manipulate images simply by moving his hands.



The TYZX G3 camera system shown here works both indoors and outdoors.

For more information, check out TYZX.

QA Cafe Looks Ahead

I had the pleasure of having lunch yesterday with Joe McEachern, founder and CEO of QA Cafe. Joe's company has two main product lines. The first, CDRouter, is a test solution for Customer Premises Equipment such as DSL modems and wireless routers. Over the past decade, a truly impressive list of customers have adopted CDRouter to ensure that their products comply with RFCs and industry standards and are easy and straightforward for consumers to use.

The second product, CloudShark, which the company introduced at the SharkFest Conference at Stanford in June, is a virtual appliance for securely storing, cataloging, and sharing packet-capture files. Instead of leaving capture files scattered over the network, enterprise IT teams and service providers can upload them into a secure repository and share them with authorized users over the Web. Which means, yes, you can now analyze capture files on your iPad.

What's new in Joe's world? In the past 6 months, droves of CPE vendors have adopted CD Router's IPv6 solution. QA Cafe introduced its IPv6 tests a couple of years ago, but it's been only recently that organizations responsible for consumer products have shown a lot of interest. Joe's conclusion: the SOHO networking industry believes it's finally time to bring IPv6 to consumers.

The other big news at QA Cafe is the ongoing development of CloudShark. Joe's team is working with prospects and customers to turn this into a truly enterprise-class IT management tool. Watch for more announcements about CloudShark in the months ahead.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

Smaller, Faster, Easier

Computing is going lightweight. The first laptops were more luggable than portable. You risked putting your back out carrying an early Mac laptop.

Over time, though, laptaps did really become light. And powerful. And thin. Now have laptops so thin that you can pack them in envelopes and call them Air.

But sometimes you don't need a device at all—even an iPad, netbook, or remote control wand.

The next generation of devices, such as televisions and some compute systems, will include 3D vision cameras that can interpret hand signals.

It's sign language for communicating with the digital world.

Here's a sign of the times: 3D vision company TYZX has received a Notice of Allowance for a new patent for using stereo vision (3D) cameras to read gestures for controlling systems such as televisions. TYZX's 3D vision systems work in variable lighting conditions and process data at 60 fps. A snap of the fingers in other words—or a wave that can be interpreted and acted upon.

The TYZX Web site has more information about their ultra-fast, ultra-compact visions systems, which are in use today in robots, interactive art installations, security systems, and more.

Photo of a hand by striatic. CC Some Rights Reserved.