paletoy

Still if you could do that , wear a noise silencing headphones an be in total silence(instead of music), won't it be nicer ?

Another question: are those earphone strongly decrease non-continuous noise(like talking) ?

Maybe i'm optimistic ,but building a dsp that connects to a few mics and an earphone amp using low latency adc's is protected.

And the other stuff is software, which in general is very hard to enforce patents on with torrents etc.

Maybe it's your personal taaste(or that you haven't tried the right earphones) , but at least according to reviews, many are quiet pleased with a good noise cancelling tech when it's working well.

Sure, you'll probably need dedicated low latency hardware. But that's probably relatively cheap, and shouldn't prevent apple ,or even a smaller company doing something in that area.

When i look at the bose QuietComfort earphones - earphones that are supposed to have(according to reviews) the unique ability to greatly block non-constant noise(for example talking) - and ability that to my knowledge nobody else has, and on the other hand are really expensive($270) and beyond the reach of many, i wonder:

Would some sort a programmable(app based) headphones enable an affordable noise reduction earphones that do a great job ?

Because all in all , noise is huge problem and a huge potential market.

This actually is quite a generic problem - most non-fiction books have a little bit of great wisdom , and a lot of fluff.

Creating a marketplace/business-model for people who write more content dense non-fiction seems like an interesting problem.

An alternative limiting factor could be the lack of great, low cost ,measurement tools. But there are some signs we're getting there, like this[1] chip based platform that can test for 170,000 proteins on a single test, cheaply.

Maybe the thing behind this google move is an understanding that it's possible, in some time feasible for google's projects, to commercialize such testing platforms, and they want in at the opportunities that will result ?

[1]http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2014/03/led-based-la...

Another guess is: they are competing on price. Nobody else can offer a mayday like service at that price point.

One big question - how much does mayday cost for amazon ?

One view is that , as far as eCommerce , mobile is really hard(very low conversion rate) and nobody has yet cracked the formula.This could be a very big risk to amazon if someone cracks it before them.

So they want to find the formula to do it right.and they must do it alone - because sharing data with others is risky. One good bet on the formula is a physical shopping button and the whole button thing. So they try.

But since it's only a trial and not a full fleshed phone with a business model(maybe it was at some point, but competition is hard and changed that),It makes sense to offer it in limited volume - more economical, easier to try new things over smaller groups, etc.

So the price is in order to sell to a few, but once they crack the formula, they prices will probably go down.

This same "trial" theory could also be true for mayday - because customer support is expensive ,but very valuable for a retailer.

Not wanting to discourage you, but reddit.com/r/science does something pretty similar and very successfully - they have 6 million subscribers ,many comm enters are scientists, and the comment quality is usually very high , and they have the reddit mail support which is highly conductive to getting responses from people.

Be realistic. What's the likelihood it's a bomb vs the likelihood of propaganda ?

> Cisco (Linksys from time to time) and others who have had a hub

The hub didn't include low power wireless which is essential for IOT.

That doesn't look like a growth story in the last year and half.

It's possible for publishers/amazon to build a contract that will protect you in that case while still letting authors drop books from the service.

If it also has non-fiction books - which usually are very amenable to skimming , or to reading just interesting parts , it's a very good value for $10.

Some technical details :

"" “We currently use a spread spectrum radio technology on the physical layer. By using spread spectrum we minimize the interference that we cause to other unlicensed devices running on the 902-928MHz band. Additionally we are not as sensitive to narrowband interference that are caused by other devices such as garage door openers and toys that are also running on the band.

“To further reduce interference and maximize battery life for tracking applications, the Iota does not transmit any messages to the Home Base unless the owner of the Iota opens up the smartphone app and requests a location update. Our protocol also scales the data rate from the Home Base to the Iotas depending on how far the Iota is from the Home Base. For an Iota that is used as a home security sensor, the data rate is on the order of a few hundred kilobits per second. For the Iotas that are a mile or more away, the data rate will scale down on the order of a few hundred bits per second (the trick to getting very long range is to trade off data rate for range).”

Each Iota home base can apparently support “thousands” of Iotas within close range running at higher data rates, or “hundreds” of Iotas “for most applications” when the tracking devices are farther away running at lower data rates, according to Wild.

“A specific Home Base gives priority to the Iotas that are associated with the owner of that Home Base,” he adds.""

from http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/15/iota/

> But from a consumer's perspective, it seems like a solution in search of problem

I think the company to look at is Philips. They really understand how to create appealing connected things. For example this article[1] that talks about their controllable color lights, cooking assistant and coffee maker, all controlled through an app to great benefit.

And once something is connected, bluetooth becomes a limitation - say you want to choose coffee type at the living room with your guests ? or you want to watch the cooking assistant while being at the kids room ? Considering that the cost of full connection should be similar to bluetooth in the best case scenario , why settle ?

[1]http://gigaom.com/2014/04/04/lights-cookers-and-coffee-a-dee...

So do you see some IOT tech that could spread without needing a router in every home ?

In my eyes, the ideal rotocol would be one that fits, but doesn't need any router at all. While not excatly that, lora , a long range(kilometers) low power/cost protocol, seems like the right choice. Just find the right model for personal deployment some open routers(similar to wifi) and let nodes seek those open nodes , and we all win.

But i'm probably missing something here, since i haven't heard of anybody doing this. I wonder what ?

I read that they will be release a new $1 stm32f4 mcu using a new process soon.

http://www.st.com/web/en/news/n3547

BTW , my mistake , it's stm32f3 , altough it's cortex-m4. a bit weird naming.

I wonder if there's a possibility, using langsec(language based security) soomething similar to build a generic tool to solve this stuff once and for all ?

> It's hard to beat the zero waiting for a given trip

What if it's 5 minutes and then no need to seek parking - which can take a long time ?

And what about being driven and able to surf/rest instead of fighting traffic ?

Hell, from reading user reviews of google's bus service it seems that public transportation can easily win the comfort battle. All that's left is winning the total "time to destination battle". And according to simulation results - car sharing can to 1.5X of regular trip maximum and less on average, And that's without "right of way" preference - with can have a big effect on those numbers.

Collect plus sounds really good. How much does it cost ?

Most groceries are bough weekly , so why is 1-day important for you? is it only for the times around the week that you miss some stuff ?

How much credit do they give ? And what's the difference between services ?

I think that shipping fees for amazon are much lower than prices offered for people at say ups. Offering half of that, wouldn't be attractive and will probably hurt the amazon brand.

The right way to implement "ship to store" is using something like "amazon locker". Assuming that's the correct route, amazon will win, because it can choose better locations than a walmart store . And in retail location is everything.

But the fact that amazon has tried some lockers but it doesn't seem the common way to buy stuff, and there's no huge scaling effort from amazon, seems to indicate that people prefer to recieve packages at home.

And bezos understands that in this game, if you want to make profits, you need for customers to love using your services.Having that ability at low enough costs could earn you a monopoly. And than might be the time to play with "amazon lockers" and other cost cutting measures.

To some extent popcorntime is self defeating. Once it become much better than netflix in every way,maybe people won't pay for content ?