Author Archives: John

Crowd Funding Update

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Back in August of last year I wrote an update on the status of the projects I have backed on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Eight months on, only one of the projects still ongoing has delivered: Parashoot. Lima and Lono are still promising to ship soon.

I also have a couple of projects not on either of the two platforms: Coin (which finally delivered this week, very late), and Nymi, a biometric authentication project (still to deliver, but different in that they won’t take the money until they ship, so really this is pre-ordering more than crowd funding).

In the meantime I have backed a few more projects:

The Egg

A personal web server gadget. This one was a little personal since I know one of the founders, but I’ve seen one of their early units and the project has some appealing features too, not least of which is the ability to share photos with friends & family without having to upload them to a public web service.

Expected delivery: September 2015

Pebble Time

This will be my third Pebble, and I upgraded the pledge to switch to the steel variant once they announced it. Not much more to say about this one.

Expected delivery: July 2015

Titanium Pens

A set of three (because I couldn’t decide on the finish I preferred & the set was a bargain compared to one or two pens). And, yes, these pens are going to ship without a refill. But they look gorgeous, and the guy behind the project already sells lots of titanium products directly from his site and clearly has a passion for this pen project. It has been incredibly over subscribed though – about 3600% more than the goal.

Expected delivery: July 2015

The Leaders Guide by Eric Ries

A new book project from Eric Ries (of lean startup fame) with lots of unlocked extras. 

Expected delivery: October 2015

Coin: The Card To Replace Them All

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What seems like a very long time ago now, I signed up for a crowdfunded project called Coin. The literally credit sized (in all dimensions) sliver of electronics claimed to be able to pretend to be all of my credit cards, selecting the one I wanted being as simple as pressing a “button” on the card.

Well, this week my card finally arrived, much later than they had originally estimated, and after a much longer beta testing period (which I had signed up to be a part of, but was not selected for).

Setting up the card was mostly straightforward (I already had the app on my iPhone and the account set up since they sent instructions for doing that part a long time ago so we could track our order too).

Loading Cards

I had a small hiccup getting the cards sync’d onto the Coin, but once I worked out that the trick was to wait for the phone app to tell me to activate the card and get it into sync mode, it all went smoothly. At least for the two credit cards.

The Starbucks card I tried to load was another problem altogether. The Coin ships with a small card reader that plugs into the headphone/mic jack on the iPhone (similar to the original Square card readers). That is able to read credit cards easily, but when it came to reading my Starbucks card it took a few swipes to get it to read, and even then the number it read from the mag stripe didn’t match the number printed on the card. I have a support request open with Coin to see whether that is expected.

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Smartwatch Thoughts

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Black Pebble Time SteelWith what seems like my entire Twitter timeline getting excited about their new Apple Watches (arriving, one after the other today it seems), I thought it would be a good time to review some of my thoughts on smartwatches, and in particular why I have not pre-ordered an Apple Watch. In fact, not only have I not pre-ordered an Apple Watch, but I have “pre-ordered” (through their Kickstarter campaign) a new Pebble Time Steel watch.

What are the pros and cons of each in my opinion (and remember, that’s all this is – my opinion; you are welcome to disagree with me and choose whichever smartwatch works best for you, or even not get one at all).

Battery Life

This is the big one for me. I already charge way too many things every day (I carry multiple phones for work, typically an iPad and a laptop, and I also have a Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire and a pair of bluetooth headphones that I have to remember to keep charged). My Pebble and my Fitbit One are my best friends w.r.t. charging since they’re roughly once a week! Getting a 20% battery life warning on my current Pebble Steel doesn’t bother me – that’s still at least a day of normal use.

Less than 24 hours seems like a big miss to me. That means one more thing I need to find an overnight charging spot for. The new Pebble Time Steel claims up to 10 days with a colour screen. I just think that Apple could have pushed the technology here.

Overall Design

I think this one is actually a tie for the new Pebble Time Steel vs the Apple Watch (in fact, I’ve seen some photos that suggest they look pretty similar). Neither wows me as much as the Moto 360, but there are plenty of reasons why I am not interested in that family of smartwatches. I do have to concede that the circular design looks stunning though. I would have loved to see a rectangular and a circular design from Apple rather than just two rectangles in (barely – just 4mm) different sizes.

That said, my two existing Pebbles look fine to me, and more importantly don’t scream smartwatch to everybody. I wear my black Pebble steel every day and get very few comments about it. I ordered the new one in black too.

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Meet Alexa, Amazon’s Assistant

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I was lucky enough to get an invite for an Amazon Echo device, which arrived earlier today. Here are my initial impressions, after just a few hours playing with the device.

Setup

Surprisingly straightforward for a Wi-Fi device with only two buttons and no display. Out of the box, the Echo beacons out an open Wi-Fi network. Connect your phone to that when prompted by their setup website & follow the instructions. In moments it was on the Wi-Fi & the open network was gone (you do need your Wi-Fi password of course). 

Voice Recognition

At the end of the setup there are some example commands to try. Unlike Apple’s Siri, Alexa (the name of the assistant inside the Echo, or, rather inside the cloud app behind it) really does understand what you say. Even from across the room.

With no other user interface to speak of, Alexa really does succeed or fail on the strength of her ability to recognize voice commands. So far, she beats Siri hands down, and I think even beats Google’s Android voice recognition (which is already very good).

Functions

So far, my favourite function is the voice command access to Amazon Prime Music. “Alexa, play …” Has played the named artist, or album or playlist with only one failure, and not a recognition failure even then: the music was not uploaded into my Amazon Music account & apparently the artist is not available on Prime Music.

The weather and the Wikipedia lookups have been big hits with my three year old, but I can see the shopping and to do lists being more useful over time. As more features are added, I can see it being even more useful, especially integrations into home control systems or the ability to voice text through my connected smartphone without even lifting a finger. Things I haven’t tried yet include the news briefing and the alarms and timers.

Initial Conclusion  

For an initial version, Alexa already has a lot of things she understands (including a great response to a classic science fiction line). The beauty of the cloud app model, as I well know from Devicescape’s cloud based amenity Wi-Fi authentication capability, is that you can add features in the cloud & not even need to worry about pushing firmware updates. Since she is on my home network, the potential for her to become the voice command gateway for the home is huge. Just imagine “Alexa, dim the lights” or “Alexa, make it warmer in here.”

Ongoing Pebble Issues

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Update: Check out my more recent update on my Pebble experiences too.

Anybody following along here will know that I have been having intermittent connection issues, as well as bluetooth audio interference issues, with my Pebble smartwatch. But more than that, I have been having issues with their customer support. Not to mention having their Chief Evangelist accuse me of whining, and then block me on Twitter. Great way to treat your customers. Guess she doesn’t want to actually hear from real users. 

On October 17, I was given this answer by one of their support folks:

We well received your logs, and will review them thoroughly and have a reply by Tuesday. Thanks for your patience.

That was a Friday. By the next Friday, October 24, I had still heard nothing other than another canned response on a different case number because I submitted more logs through their app and it generates a new case each time suggesting I upgrade to iOS 8.1 (which I had already done, and which has made no difference).

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Apple Pay Experiences

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Monday of this week saw iOS 8.1 land on Apple devices, and perhaps the most expected feature in the update was Apple Pay; the new NFC based, Touch ID approved payment service that was going to revolutionize how we pay for things. Or not, because of course NFC based payments have existed in Android phones for a while now, and even in plastic credit cards (mostly outside the US, but my Wells Fargo Visa card has both a chip and touch pay capabilities).

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Pebble Issues

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Pebble SteelAs one of the people who backed Pebble in their Kickstarter campaign, and somebody who subsequently upgraded to the Steel Pebble when it was launched, it saddens me to write this, but at this point I feel Pebble is going to find it hard to survive, and for two simple reasons: they don’t seem to care about software quality, nor their customers.

At a time when Google, Samsung and Apple are creating much more sophisticated smart watches, it would seem like a good idea for Pebble to keep its existing customers happy, and to take seriously any reports of problems. Instead, every problem I have reported has gone unaddressed (aside from some brush off suggestions that I un-pair/re-pair or restart the watch, reboot the phone etc). I would actually consider the hardware part to be fine, and despite not having all the bells & whistles of the others, it wins hands down on battery life (most of the time), and provides the essentials needed in a smart watch. But, the software is buggy, and the support experience is terrible, and without those aspects working well too, I don’t believe they will be able to compete.

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Square, Coin and Smart Bank Cards

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I read a blog post today from the folks at Square talking about how the more secure smart card enabled bank cards are coming to the US soon. That reminded me of my initial reaction to Square when it was first being hyped: “oh great, another magnetic stripe reader; can’t the US please move to something better.”

I first encountered embedded chips in my bank cards back in the early 1990s, in France – that is over 20 years ago. While my UK cards today still have the magnetic stripe (so they work in the US!), they also have chips and contactless touch pay capabilities.

When companies like Square, and more recently Coin, create technologies that are dependent on magnetic stripe technology I am amazed. It sounds like Square will be in a position to get new readers to their existing business customers. I don’t see how Coin will even survive if the US really can make significant progress in switching to chip & PIN technology next year (although I do have two cards now from US banks with the technology in them).

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iPhone 6 Case

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Waterfield Smart CaseAll my iPhones to date, starting with my 3GS, have lived inside a Smart Case from Waterfield Designs; my iPads have likewise lived in one of their Ultimate Sleeve cases. They are a local firm here in San Francisco, and I love their products and their service. 

When I pre-ordered my 6, the site I visited next was theirs to get an estimate of when they would have my favourite case ready for the new phone.

But there was no Smart Case listed for the iPhone 6. I reached out to them on Twitter, and it seems it will not be there for a while. They do have a number of other options, but none really appealed to me in the way the Smart Case had (and I have had 3 of them now spanning 5 years of use, so they have become familiar).

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AT&T’s “GeorgeA” Was Right

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Of all the people I spoke to earlier in the week about the sudden change in the estimated delivery date for my iPhone 6 from delivering on 9/19 when I ordered it to delivering 10/13-10/31 when I checked the online status, only GeorgeA from the @ATTCustomerCare Twitter team suggested that the reason the order could not be canceled was that it really was still scheduled to ship in time for September 19 and it was the new estimate that was incorrect.

Today’s status on AT&T’s site has changed from estimating delivery in the second half of October, to shipped and expected to arrive tomorrow:

Shipped

It amazes me that their e-commerce systems can’t keep track of things a little better, but it would almost have been better to just say they didn’t have a delivery date available than to estimate delivery over a month after the order date. I’ve heard of under promising and over delivering, but that’s taking it to an extreme!

Thank You GeorgeA

I would like to say a big thank you to GeorgeA both for spending the time earlier in the week explaining what he saw and what he thought it meant, and for being the only AT&T employee I spoke to on Tuesday who could work out that the error actually meant.