Hasta La Gadget!

While Nokia continues to work on clawing back some of the once-market-leading smartphone business it has lost in the last few years to Apple and Android handset makers like Samsung, it has also slowly been building out a business based around its mapping and navigation division, rebranded as HERE earlier this year. That strategy — which has seen deals with the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW and Garmin for its in-car navigation systems — is going into high gear today. Nokia is launching Connected Driving, which included HERE Auto for embedded in-car navigation; HERE Auto Cloud for extra services like real-time traffic updates; and HERE Auto Companion, apps that will make it seamless to link up location data that you want to use or that you’ve created in your car, with what you are doing when you are outside the car and using your smartphone instead. On top of this, it’s upgrading its HERE Traffic system with a new data processing engine called “Halo.”

The launch today, in some regards, represents one of Nokia’s biggest challenges yet: it’s pitching itself as an operating system provider for other hardware makers (car companies; in-car system makers) to use as the platform for new products. Call it Nokia’s Android strategy.

Nokia is announcing the new products today and will be unveiling this suite of services at the the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany on September 10. As with the rest of the products in HERE, Nokia’s intention is for all of this to be interoperable with different smartphone platforms. What that will mean in theory is that while HERE Auto and Auto Cloud will be loaded on to in-car systems, the apps in the Auto Companion will be launched for multiple platforms, including iOS and Android. In practice, though, Floris van de Klashorst, VP of connected cars for HERE, tells me that it’s likely that we will see the first services to be built on the platform that Nokia itself uses for smartphones, Windows Phone.

A rundown of the new services:

HERE Auto. This is Nokia’s embedded in-car navigation service. Using cached content, Nokia says it’s the first on the market that provides comprehensive mapping data even when a user doesn’t have a data connection. This includes turn by turn voice guided navigation in 95 countries, as well as 2D, 3D and satellite map views, with street-level imagery. Van de Klashorst tells me that Nokia is now also working on an SDK (yet to be released publicly) that will let third parties integrate services directly into this experience. He pointedly tells me that this will not include ads, which users they have surveyed have said are too distracting in cars. But this doesn’t rule out placing markers, for example, for a particular pizza joint when you are driving by it looking for some Italian food. Other features that are likely to come in by way of the SDK are music services and social networking services (not distracting like ads at all, right?!). Early users of this before the wider release include in-car system maker Continental, which is using them as part of its “Open Infotainment Platform.” I’d expect other app makers and navigation service companies to be added to the list soon.

HERE Auto Cloud. Like HERE Auto, this is also designed to work with and without data connections — useful for when you are in remote areas, or you are in regions where you may be roaming outside of your carrier’s network. This is Nokia’s own layer of extra services around driving — for example real-time traffic updates, helping drivers avoid congested areas, road closures or blockages that occur en route, as well as other services such as recommendations on places to eat, parking spots, information on where to charge an electric vehicle or where to find the most inexpensive fuel.

From the screenshots that Nokia provided to me, it looks like this is one of the fruits of its relationship with Foursquare:

HERE Auto Companion. This is the bridge between what Nokia is doing in the car and what it is doing outside of it. The Auto Companion, as Van de Klashorst demonstrated to me, works both on the web and as a mobile app, and it’s actually very cool: what it lets you do is create mapping instructions or take notes of a place that you’d like to visit, when you are sitting at your computer or on your phone, and then, when you get into your HERE-powered car, those data points follow you. If you start a trip in your car, and then park it, you can continue finding your way using your handset. Taking a page from the many apps that let users control what their TVs at home are recording, Nokia says that drivers can also use the app to find their car (using LiveSight augmented reality technology) and check stats for fuel levels and tire pressure. Part of this will be based on the new HALO platform, which basically will gather data using different sensors on the car. This will be used not just for app services for the consumer but to help gather more accurate information about weather in a particular place and more.

For cars that are shared between more than one person (say, in a family) each user can have his or her own interface in a vehicle:

Van de Klashorst tells me that the big idea here is to personalize those in-car experiences: “One thing that is apparent is that people have a strong relationship both with their cars and with their phones, but the in-car systems are ice cold. People cannot influence or modify or personalise them. To make them personal is a very important aspect.”

And when you think about this, it’s a potentially interesting area when you link it up with wider trends in the automotive space, such as with car sharing services like Zipcar. “With car sharing services, this car that you don’t own becomes your car. Systems like this once will be a very important part of elevating and experience to make it your own,” he notes.

Apart from the challenges of competing against other smartphone players (including Google, Apple and BlackBerry) who also have stakes in the automotive game — Apple already has integrations with several car makers and there are often rumors swirling of how this will expand over time; Google has gone so far as to create self-driving vehicles; and BlackBerry has QNX — Nokia is doing this from a position that is not without its own challenges. In Nokia’s last quarterly earnings, Here posted sales of $305 million, down 18% over last year, up 8% on the previous quarter and it remains loss-making, with a $116 million operating deficit, which is at least marginally better than the $120 million a year ago. (A HERE representative points out, however, that the division has “underlying profitability” and “strong automotive sales,” showing that it’s following through on establishing financial independence from Nokia’s smartphone business.)

Still, Nokia has in its hands a very key asset: it holds one of the biggest databases of mapping information in the world, meaning it doesn’t need to rely on third parties for it. And even with its many layoffs, it still employs hundreds of engineers that are thinking of clever ways of using that to Nokia’s advantage. Nokia has nothing to lose by trying to get out into pole position in this space at this still-early stage in the connected car revolution.

Tablets! They’re everywhere you look, and fast replacing PCs, which are suffering dwindling sales. But just because tablets are rising in popularity doesn’t mean enterprise IT departments should go all-in on touch based interfaces. A new Forrester report suggests that people want keyboards with their tablets, however, which makes sense because no matter what anyone says typing on a software keyboard can’t possibly beat using a full-sized notebook QWERTY, in any of all possible universes.

Forrester’s survey of over 1,000 information workers across the U.S. and Europe found that 62 percent of them who either currently or would like to use a tablet at work also want a wireless keyboard, or keyboard dock attachment to use with them. 35 percent want a convertible laptop device, and another 34 percent say they’d like to use tablets where needed and then just switch back to a standard computer when doing plenty of typing.

That’s potentially good news for the non-Apple tablet market, since OEMs like Asus and Xplore (which just ranked third in a tablet vendor survey aimed at business by ABI research) that make tablet devices with alternate form factors and keyboard attachments. But before Microsoft reads too much into this in terms of seeing it as a bright spot for Surface tablets, it needs to go look at the sales and performance of those devices, and Windows RT in particular, and realize that no. Just no.

This is probably better news for makers of tablet-specific keyboard accessories – there’s likely a huge market to be had just selling into enterprise and business settings to help outfit current iPad deployments with the keyboards workers crave. Also, there’s room for a true category-bridging device to make waves yet.

How’s this for a two-for-one deal: Your cat is going to have a blast, and you get a geeky DIY project. Your mission: To create a cat-friendly model of the Enterprise and/or a Romulan Bird of Prey.

It’s the perfect excuse to name your cat Spot and put some Data makeup on for the ultimate cosplay. You know that Data would have this in his quarters for Spot if he hadn’t been so busy with all of his adventures.

See how it was built step-by-step over at Instructables. It seems like a fairly easy build for anyone who has a cat and a love of Star Trek. If I had two cats, I would build both and let them pretend to battle each other.

[via The Mary Sue]

Raspberry Pi has unsurprisingly been a smash hit with the maker community. But here’s an enterprise startup that is using the $35/$25 microcomputer — or rather hundreds of them at a time — as a network monitoring tool for corporate networks that bypasses the need for humans to report network outages to a help-desk.

U.S. startup NetBeez, which was founded in April and recently graduated from the Pittsburgh-based AlphaLab accelerator, is developing a tool that uses multiple Raspberry Pis to monitor network connectivity and notify administrators when a problem is detected. NetBeez received $25,000 from AlphaLab and is also backed by $100,000 in convertible notes. It’s currently raising a seed round.

The basic idea is that the Pis simulate user activity on a network, enabling the system to pick up problems that affect end users without having to wait for actual humans to be annoyed by a sudden lack of connectivity. Being as each Pi is so (relatively) low cost, it’s possible for NetBeez to install hundreds per company to monitor uptime across an entire enterprise network footprint — such as every bank branch outlet, for instance — without the overall cost becoming prohibitively expensive to the customer.

“NetBeez is a tool to validate network changes and catches outages before they affect the end user,” explains co-founder, Panagiotis Vouzis. “A large percentage of network outages are caused after engineers make changes to their network. Current monitoring tools give a detailed view of the routers and switches, but they miss the information about the connectivity of the end user. So, when an engineer makes a change at 2:00 am (they work off hours to affect the least number of users in case something goes wrong) they don’t know if the end user has been affected or not.

“Often, the outages they cause are detected at 8:00 am when the first employees come in to work, and they can’t work until the problem gets resolved. Only on critical configuration changes people are sent office to office at 2:00 am to check if everything is up and running. This is cumbersome, costly, doesn’t scale, and cannot be applied to every change.”

This is where NetBeez steps in and installs Pis running its monitoring software (aka Beez) behind the switch — aka “exactly where the end-user connects” — thereby giving the network engineer visibility on whether configuration changes done in the middle of the night are going to affect all the local office workers in the morning.

“There are many types of outages that are detected by the end user only. They have to call the help desk, that then informs the IT department about the problem. The Beez acts as a proactive and distributed network monitoring tool that catches problems that remain undetected by the current state of the art. It bypasses the help-desk process,” adds Vouzis.

Vouzis says it intends to target the tool at large and medium companies that have complex networks and a need to minimise network outages and downtime. It’s been running a beta program since May, with three demo customers on board who have “a strong presence in Pennsylvania and West Virginia”.

Both Vouzis and his fellow co-founder, Stefano Gridelli, have a background in network engineering. The business model for NetBeez will either be an upfront cost or a monthly or yearly fee per Bee and for use of  NetBeez’s server system, adds Vouzis.

The space shuttle Enterprise, has a new baby brother. A fully-detailed, 1/35th scale replica of the prototype orbiter. Today, Ed Diment, Lego "Master Builder," unveiled his latest model at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. It’s on display this weekend ONLY, so get off your ass and check it out!

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