The Barcelona connection

Luis Enrique arrived at the Camp Nou famous for being a man that likes to take care of every tiny detail. One of the most striking techniques that the manager uses is the use of advanced technology during the game to improvise and adopt new tactics on the fly.

It is common to see Juan Carlos Unzue, his assistant manager, wearing an earpiece with which he receives vital information. But who is at the other end of this technology and what is being said?

Two people from Luis Enrique's team position themselves higher up in the stadium. From their elevated position, Robert Moreno and Joan Barbara can see how everyone is moving around on the pitch, the spaces that are being made, the chances that might be had. With this privileged information, they speak directly to Unzue down in the dugout, who in turn talks to the Barca manager.



Barbara has known Luis Enrique since the Asturian coached Barcelona's B team. The man's keen eye and experience in evaluating the other team's strengths and weaknesses are invaluable. What he thinks is relevant he tells Moreno, who passes it on directly to Unzue wearing the earpiece.

This way of working is nothing new. Guardiola used the mobile in his time at Barcelona. One of his assistants used to talk to him on the phone from high up, giving his perspective of the game. The man doing the calling was Carlos Naval. Today, Luis Enrique has now perfected the technique that he adopted when training Barca B in the 2010-11 season.

Read more:The Barcelona connection - MARCA.com (English version)

Legalize it? Colo. considers one-ear, in-car headsets

Colorado could become more friendly for hands-free talking under a proposed tweak to state traffic law.

The bill would specifically legalize the use of one-ear headsets by drivers, if connected to a mobile phone.

Current Colorado law bans the use of "earphones" behind the wheel, which is defined as "any headset, radio, tape player, or other similar device which provides the listener with radio programs, music, or other recorded information through a device attached to the head and which covers all of or a portion of the ears."

While that definition does not specifically cover phone calls, it leaves enough ambiguity in law that a small group of House Democrats wants to clear it up.

HB 1207 would add an exception to the definition of "earphones" in state law, to exempt: "a headset that only covers all or a 10 portion of one ear and that is connected to a wireless, hand-held telephone."

The house transportation committee unanimously passed the bill on Thursday morning.

Colorado law does not specifically address the issue of hands-free phone use versus calls made with a handset held to the driver's head. Under Colorado law, adults are allowed to engage in phone calls behind the wheel, while minors are not.

Numerous scientific studies conclude that hands-free talking is not significantly safer for drivers than talking with the phone held to the ear.

More important than tying up a hand is the fact that engaging in a phone conversation ties up the brain, splitting a driver's attention between the call and the road and using a significant chunk of the brains cognitive capacity when it would be better applied to the task of driving.

In 2013, Colorado police officers reported that 1,311 crashes were caused at least in part by distraction due to a cell phone, roughly the same number caused by distractions from passengers actually in the cars that crashed.

That statistic does not differentiate between the use of a phone for talking versus texting. Texting behind the wheel is illegal for drivers of all ages in Colorado.

Source - http://www.9news.com/story/tech/personal-tech/2015/02/11/one-ear-headsets-drivers/23234425/

Why Are Headphones Becoming More Popular?

For once, here’sa simple answer. Headphones are increasing in popularity at a similar rate as portable devices are. The more devices there are on sale, the more headphones will be flying off the shelves with them.

Headsets are useless without a device to make use of them with, so it stands to reason that headphones are being bought together with other acquisitions.

Not only are Tablet PCs selling like hot cakes right now, but additionally increasingly more people are buying iPods and other MP3 players. The iPod, especially, has had a massive social impact. When I used to be little, anybody over the age of about 16 who was wearing headphones and never jogging looked stupid, they appeared like some type of impotent man-child caught in a desperate try to re-capture lost youth. These bizarre nerdlings always looked odd, they walked around in a peculiar manner, sort of a kangaroo that needed a sh*t.

Today naturally, it is perfectly normal for any person of any age to own an iPod. Even US President Barack Obama was asked about his iPod whilst over on the campaign trail. So it's no surprise that sales of headphones are shooting up.

In addition to the, as gaming technology became more immersive, so began the steady rise of gaming headphones. Of course, in order to chat, argue, or just play together online, you needed an innovative pair of headphones.

Today, Tablet PCs use headphones, mobile phones use headphones, portable gaming devices use headphones, in reality, basically everything uses headphones. If I can’t sleep at nighttime, I listen to music on my headphones so as to not wake my girlfriend up and I listen to music whenever I go out anywhere, exactly like everybody else.

Next time you’re out and about, look around you and see just how many people are listening to something, its not just kids, its not just trendy adults, its everyone.

Headsets inevitably need replacing, which leads inexorably to much more sales. Headphones are in the reach of everyone, even the painfully uncool, so the epileptic flamingo men are at last triumphant.

How Does a Two Way Radio Work? (Asked by Neil from Reading)

Hi Neil,

Did you get a two way radio set from Santa by any chance? Lol.

Anyway, onto your question...

A two way radio basically is a radio that can send and receive signals. If a radio can both transmit and receive, it is known as a transceiver (see what they did there?) Two or more users can use a transceiver in order to communicate on a shared channel.

Essentially, a two way radio works by receiving radio waves through the air and broadcasting a return signal. The antenna on the radio houses a series of electrons, which dictate the channel being picked up by the user (different groups of electrons will respond to different channels). These electrons translate the radio waves into electrical impulses, which are then fed to a small processor. The processor then converts the impulses into a signal and the radio’s speakers then play that signal. The whole process, amazingly, is pretty much instant.

Two way radios convert sound into radio waves and also convert radio waves into sound. Ergo, I can speak to you, like so:

Chris: “Hi Neil. Can you hear me? Over”

Once I push the PTT (push to talk) button and speak, the vibrations of my voice shake a small membrane inside my radio’s microphone (not a million miles removed from the one that exists in the human ear). My radio’s processor then converts those vibrations into a simple electrical signal. The radio pushes the signal to the antenna, which then pushes it out on the audio channel selected.

The electrons in your antenna become excited (steady on there, fella!) and translate the waves into electrical impulses, which are then ‘decoded’ by the processor and played out via your speakers.

So, you hear this on your radio and you reply.

Neil: “Hey 2wayradionline. Yeah, I can hear you just fine. Thanks for the answer. Over”

Whereupon the entire process takes place all over again.

And so on...

I hope that answers your question. Have fun, 2wayradionline.co.uk!

How Dick Tracy Invented the Apple Watch

Apple CEO Tim Cook suddenly became a little boy again as he showed that Apple’s new smart watch will also send and receive phone calls.

“I have been wanting to do this since I was 5 years old,” Cook exclaimed. “The day is finally here.”

The 54-year-old Cook was harking back to 1965, when any American youngster could tell you that the coolest gizmo around was Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio.

The comic strip detective’s creator, Chester Gould, had introduced the futuristic device in 1946, after he scripted Tracy into a jam from which there seemed no credible escape.

Gould decided that he would go high-concept and have Tracy appeal directly to his inky-fingered creator. Gould figured he could then just extricate Tracy from the predicament Manus Dei.

But Gould’s employer, the Chicago Tribune, rejected the idea as a cheat.



Gould then recalled visiting the workshop of an inventor extraordinaire named Al Gross several weeks before. Gross had developed the walkie-talkie when he was barely out of high school. Gross’s more recent projects when Gould stopped by included a two-way radio that could be worn on the wrist like a watch.

Gould now got on the phone to Gross.

“He called and asked if he could use that idea on the wristwatch,” Gross would say in an interview years later. “I told him sure. And he gave Dick Tracy that wristwatch.”

As a token of his gratitude, Gould presented Gross with the first four panels in which Tracy begins using the soon-to-be-famous gizmo. The device proved to be just the thing for Tracy to extricate himself along with his creator from the predicament.

Do you remember the old dick tracy comics? we're not convinced that Tim cook got the idea from these comics, it's an interesting idea that the whole of apple was built on the idea that one day they would emulate the comic books.

In the comic strip, the two-way wrist radio is created by a young inventor named Brilliant. He develops another seemingly impossible gadget for Tracy conceived by the real-life Gross: a compact, battery-powered video surveillance camera. This is too much for one of the comic-strip mobsters, and Brilliant meets a bloody end in a 1948 installment.

As a token of his gratitude, Gould presented Gross with the first four panels in which Tracy begins using the soon-to-be-famous gizmo. The device proved to be just the thing for Tracy to extricate himself along with his creator from the predicament.

In the comic strip, the two-way wrist radio is created by a young inventor named Brilliant. He develops another seemingly impossible gadget for Tracy conceived by the real-life Gross: a compact, battery-powered video surveillance camera. This is too much for one of the comic-strip mobsters, and Brilliant meets a bloody end in a 1948 installment.

Gross did enjoy a continuing thrill that had been first sparked when he was still in grammar school. His parents took him on a cruise across Lake Erie from Cleveland to Buffalo, and his destiny was decided when he wandered into the ship’s radio room.

“The radio operator put me on his lap and let me put the earphones on,” Gross would remember. “I heard all of those dots and dashes, and I’ve been interested ever since.”

Wonderment was joined by wondering, and the result powered a lifetime of prophetic tinkering. Gross followed up the walkie-talkie during World War II with a ground-to-air radio system. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff credited it with “saving millions of lives by shortening the war.”

Yet the closest Gross came to fame was as a pioneering Citizens Band radio operator dubbed “the Father of CB.” Even in this he was best known not by his real name but by his handle, Phineas Thaddeus Veeblefetzer.

Not that Gross needed recognition. He was still busy in his workshop right up to the time of his death in late 2000, at the age of 82.

Childhood fascination was at the heart of it all, so it only makes sense that his two way wrist radio would have had a similar effect on youngsters over the years, these notably including little Timmy Cook in 1965.

On Monday, Cook said he had been wanting for half a century to unveil a real-life gizmo that worked just like the one in the comic strip of his youth.

One hopes Cook is aware that the two-way wrist radio was itself inspired by the real-life ideas of a visionary who should be as well-known to us as Jobs or Gates.

Gross observed in his later years, “‘If you have a cordless telephone or a cellular telephone or a walkie-talkie or beeper, you’ve got one of my patents.”

And now we can posthumously add the Apple Watch.

Source - http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/10/how-dick-tracy-invented-the-apple-watch.html

Martian Homes Could Be Built In Just 24 Hours

By the end of this century, it seems highly likely that people will be living on Mars. It sounds utterly mad, until you consider that there were only 66 years between the first powered and sustained Human flight and Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon...

However, a major problem with this idea (aside from the fact that no Human being has ever actually set foot on the red planet) is the difficulty posed by building habitation in such a hostile and extremely remote environment.

At the moment, even landing an unmanned rover on Mars represents a major scientific achievement, which makes Elon Musk’s plans to build a city there seem especially far fetched and ambitious.

Besides, at current costs, taking one kilogram of material to the moon costs between £61,000 and £122,000. That’s a lot of money, even for bare essentials like building materials and water reserves.

Now, however, one man thinks he may have the answer...

Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering is working on a groundbreaking new method of building that, if applied to lunar or Martian colonisation, could bring us all that much closer to seeing cities on Mars or the moon in our lifetimes.

Essentially, Dr. Khoshnevis has come up with a way to ‘print’ buildings.

The construction technology, called Contour Crafting, fashions an entire building, layer by layer, according to a predetermined outline. Khoshnevis initially created the technology in order to provide cheap, quick and safe housing for emerging nations, or victims of natural disasters.



It is hoped that such building methods will also lower the demand for wood, thus having a beneficial effect on the rainforests and other areas that are being aggressively deforested for timber.

In addition, the concrete walls built by the Countour Crafter are three times stronger than a brick wall.

Writing for Nasa, Dr. Khoshnevis said, “Automated building technologies will revolutionize the way structures are built on Earth, in dense urban environments, in difficult-to-build and difficult-to-service sites, or in remote and hostile regions of the globe. The technologies under development by our group have the potential to simplify construction logistics, reduce the need for hard physical labor by assigning humans to a strictly supervisory role, eliminate issues relating to human safety and produce intricate, aesthetically refined designs and structures at significantly reduced construction cost”.

Theoretically, these buildings could be described via a computer model and built remotely, using the Martian landscape in lieu of bricks and mortar. The buildings could be ‘printed’ in around 24 hours and would be every bit as strong, (or stronger) than the building you are currently living in.

RFID and AIDC News: What is Zebra's Strategy for Motorola's Mobile Wireless and Data Collection Businesses?

In early 2014, printing and RFID system focused Zebra Technologies announced it was acquiring the "Enterprise Systems" business from Motorola Solutions, in a deal that closed in late October. That left Motorola to focus on its radio systems business.

It was a somewhat surprising move, certainly moving Zebra up the supply chain food change. What was the strategy behind the deal? How fast and how far will the integration of Motorola into Zebra go? Is Zebra now a "solutions" company?

SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore recently interviewed Mike Terzich, Zebra's Chief Administrative Officer who is leading the integration program, on these and several other topics.

Gilmore: Mike, before we start talking about the Motorola Enterprise acquisition, you've been around the Auto ID industry for two decades. Not long ago, it was a very recognized and defined space. Now, not so much. It doesn't receive much press coverage at all today, though SCDigest is trying to rectify that a bit. Is it because it's just so easy to make it work today that end users just don't need much education any more?

Terzich: I think part of the reason that it has evolved the way it has is that if you look at who the industry icons were back in the day, the Intermecs, the Symbols [Symbol Technologies], the Telxons, the Hand Held Products, Datamax - all of them have been consolidated up into large industrial conglomerates. Zebra is really one of the last of the independents.

For years, you had so much independent development, and every manufacturer had their own operating language and everything was proprietary, so that added a dimension of complexity that users had to deal with. Over time, as architectures became more open and interoperable, the mystery kind of disappeared on how to implement and integrate this stuff. The question now is not really about the technical aspects, but issues like how to optimize my assets across my supply chain network. Today it is much more of an application and business question than it is a technical one with Auto ID.

Gilmore: I must admit the Motorola announcement took me a bit by surprise, though it was clear there were some tensions within the old Motorola Solutions between the radio side and the wireless and data collection businesses. What was Zebra's strategy in making this deal?

Terzich: A little bit history - we tried to be part of the opportunity back in 2006 and 2007 when Symbol Technologies was put on the market and eventually found its way to Motorola. We made a pitch at the time - I was personally involved - and as I like to say we were a day late and a dollar short in terms of making a deal.

So our interest level from a strategic perspective has really been in place for seven years. So when the opportunity re-presented itself last year, our CEO Anders Gustafsson and Motorola started to have some conversations. For us, it was always about the attraction of where we saw the market evolving, and this whole concept around enterprise apps and intelligence, the interest of companies to optimize across their value chains, and we felt that the combination of Zebra and the enterprise mobility business from Motorola made complete sense because it allowed us to offer a broader portfolio and a higher percentage of the solution offering.

For us, it also allows us to become closer to the application development side of the business. As a printing company, while we had a vision and an aspiration to be part of where enterprises were willing to go in terms of managing their business, it's hard to lead application and solution development around your brand when you're the printing component. Printing has become almost second nature today, while the wireless business and the portfolio Motorola has there in terms of mobile computing and the trends were we seeing with Cloud-based application development, the Internet of Things, asset optimization, and ubiquitous mobility - that's what enticed us to say this is still a very relevant strategic opportunity today as it was back in 2007.

Gilmore: I understand you have rather fully integrated Motorola in already. I would have thought that initially, given the very different nature of the business, that you would have started with it as separate SBU. I also understand you are quickly getting rid of the Motorola brand name in favor of it all being Zebra Technologies. Is that correct, and if Yes, what was the thinking?

Terzich: It's semi-correct. Where we are integrated is in our go-to-market strategy and our face to the customer. When you look at where Motorola Enterprise Mobility was selling, who their customers were and their routes to market, it was a combination of strategically calling on some very large end users and a significant reseller and integrator channel. It turned out that the amount of common end user customers and channel partners between Zebra and Motorola Enterprise is really quite significant.

So we had the opportunity to integrate sales forces, and when you think about it through the eyes of the sales team, your carrying more products in your sales bag, you are selling largely to the same channel partners that Zebra and Motorola were both selling to independently. The largest end users are mostly customers in common, so there was some natural synergistic opportunity in our go to market model.

Where we have remained separate is in the R&D and development side, because the product lines are complementary not competitive, and over time Motorola's competency in mobile computing, data collection and wireless networks are unique skill sets for us. So we are maintaining separate engineering and product development organizations, but we come together with a common global sales and marketing organization.

Gilmore: And what about the branding? Is the Motorola name gone, it is now all Zebra Technologies going forward?

Terzich: From a contractual/legal perspective, we have to get off the name and the "batwings" [the Motorola logo] as part of the transaction, so it's not like we have a choice. We can however leverage the Symbol Technologies brand, and we are going to do that as a product brand is some isolated areas. But Symbol as a name has been out of circulation for about seven years, and while it has some affinity say in the reseller community, the long term strategy is that everything will be branded Zebra Technologies.

But in the transitional period there will be some product that have to transfer to a Symbol products sub-brand as a means to get off of the Motorola bat wings.

Gilmore: What's your take on wireless systems market? It really now is just down in the US to just two major players, Honeywell and now Zebra. Is it is still a good market, a growth market?

Terzich: What's interesting about the combination is we're now number one in mobile computing, number one in data collection, and number one in printing. We have a very large global service organization. And then you get to wireless LAN, and that's the fifth of our major revenue buckets.

What's interesting about wireless LAN is that it has the highest growth profile of any of those segments, but clearly Motorola's position here is not number 1. You have some very large players [e.g., Cisco] that operate in a more horizontal market mode, and focus generally on more "carpeted" areas of a business, versus a distribution center or shop floor or a retail store. I think Motorola had done a nice job of carving out a niche relative to some markets that we service, principally in the retail and some of the hospitality markets, and the product has been successful and we have quite a bit of customer loyalty in these sectors.

So our strategy going forward from a wireless LAN perspective is to be very vertically focused and application specific where the product has some advantages, and to build off that customer loyalty. We don't think the answer is to compete broadly in the wireless LAN marketplace because we don't have the R&D engine or the brand equity in some of those markets or applications.

So we are going to stick to our knitting, which will concentrated in retail, hospitality and healthcare, where our product seems to resonate.

Gilmore: You and Motorola use primarily a channels strategy. Are you in the solutions business, and can you do that if you use a channels strategy and are one-step removed from the customer?

Terzich: Great question.

One of the things that most people don't realize is that Zebra, organically before the Motorola acquisition, had about 80% of its business through channels and about 20% through some large, named strategic accounts. And those accounts tended to be some very sophisticated adopters of technology that effectively act as their own systems integrator.

These are large retailers, large transportation companies, and large manufacturers that well understand how to deploy technology to drive efficiency and productivity. So that was our composite, and Motorola's was very similar, the difference being that because Motorola offered enterprise mobile computing, they tended to call a little higher in those organizations, and they worked more closely with application developers and independent software developers because usually the real problem is solved by application software and re-engineering of business processes.

So Motorola may have been calling on maybe 40% of its revenue from a strategic account perspective, and that means they had a seat at the end user table and they are influencing those companies, even if those are sometimes still being fulfilled through channels.

So where do we fall in the solutions spectrum? Both product lines do not constitute a solution by themselves, they still need to connect to application software and that requires integration support. So the channel will remain a very vital part of the strategy.

At a very simple level, we see that there are opportunities for better enabling application software. So how do we make mobile printing devices and mobile computing and data collection devices better together from a product design set? How do we make our technology more interoperable and attractive for application development?

When you look at this technology and how ubiquitous it is you, find that deployment is really though many hundreds of application developers. You don't see a small number of applications as being really dominant. Our job is to continue to work with those developers to make our solutions as easy to integrate with them as we can.

No CIO or CFO goes to bed at night thinking "I need to bar code something." But they do wake up and say I need to take a billion dollars out my supply chain, or whatever the figure is. What we do is often a key piece of what becomes the strategy to achieve those goals.

Gilmore: If I understand it right, you have released your own Voice solution, originally developed by Motorola's Psion unit in Europe, here into the US market. Before, Motorola relied exclusively on partners here for Voice software. What is the strategy?

Terzich: Ultimately, Voice as a technology is just another extension of using mobility to make operations more productive and efficient, especially in warehousing applications. So it's really just a continuum to us of bringing more capability to those that are trying to optimize workflow. Workflow has become without question one of the biggest areas of opportunity across anyone's supply chain. This is part of why we are so excited about the combined portfolio in general, and our Voice solution is part of that.

Gilmore: Mike, appreciate you sharing your insight today.

Terzich: Thanks Dan. I enjoyed the conversation.



For more information and conversation visit the source of this article - http://www.scdigest.com/ontarget/15-02-04-1.php?cid=8965