OLED lighting

Over the past month I am using an LED powered reading lamp. It is simple, cute, and powerful. Use of LED also means the lamp is 'cool', really I mean it. The entire lamp is powered by 3 AAA batteries. Wow!

I wondered how we can get bigger lights using the same technology. The first thought is to get an array of LEDs strung together to bring the effect. However such an array looks ugly. They would look like a corn with little bulbs projecting out. Instead what we need is a nice flat surface.

There is all this rage about LED TVs in the market. See
1080p 120 Hz LED LCD VA Panel HDTV, Black for an example. These LED TVs are supposed to offer high quality display at smallest TV size. Indeed they do. The display is cool. I am writing this blog using a computer that uses one such LED screen. The screen offers dynamic control of colors and images to provide better lighting. It is late night. And I also had turned off all lights in the home relying mostly on the LED Screen's backlight to help me use the computer. It is powerful and bright. Voila, we should use this.

Imagine having LED lights for our entire home. In theory these should reduce energy consumption while offering rich ability to project light - colors, patterns, intensity, etc. Imagine if we can have programmable lighting inside the house. Imagine the lights dancing to the moods, music, and people in the house. That will add a living personality to these lights. What may be required for the same. Need to think about this further.

A quick search through the internet revealed that there are nice panels on the way making to the US market. OLED Light Guide Panels are bright ideas that provide rich way for us to add brightness to our lives. I am committing to buy more LED based lighting products. And of course that means there is more delight waiting for me.

Music from India - Nice site and great quality music

I love music - particularly the instrumentals. In the 1990s when I used to return back from my India trips with boxes of cassette tapes. Then it was bringing music on CDs. Later these CDs became MP3 CDs packed with lots of music. It was amazing to see how the music was becoming compact to carry while quality was going up all the time.

I love the wonders of technology. 1000s of innovations by countless number of individuals in the music, technology, retail, manufacturing and other industries has paved way for such an amazing transformation for users like me. What used to be only for the rich is now available and accessible for everyone in the world.

One such latest innovation is the cloud based delivery of music. Over the past few months I am listening to music from Music India Online that features a LARGE number of music from India in the streaming format. Now I need to hardly carry anything around the world. The music quality is awesome. And I can almost access this from any PC or MAC. It is still hard to access this music from my car or my portable music player. I eagerly await the day when that next transformation happens.

Enjoy the Music while it lasts.

Domains, domains, ...

Who would have thought that one can sell just electronic records and make money. That is precisely what godaddy.com does. They sell registration records for internet hosted domains. It is simple, easy, and cool to have a domain of our own. and of course it is simple, easy, and profitable for godaddy.com. I have a few domains with them. I like the domains because it allows me to host dedicated content easily.

You can get your own domain too.
Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!

Smart Phones!

The world is a new place now. Over the past decade I had used one form of smart phone or other.

It all started with an LG Stylus phone on Sprint network back in year 2000. I loved that phone primarily because of its ability to synchronize contacts with Outlook through a cable. And of  course I was able to use the stylus to doodle on one of the built in applications. Then it was various forms of Windows Mobile Phones for several years. All funky names, but synchronization to Outlook was a standard feature. Over time the synchronization morphed into synchronization with Exchange server. That also meant that I got access to mail and calendar.

Last year I had tried the iPhone which was great. The applications on the phone were a delight. It was a sea change. Touch screen, great hardware, and applications meant the life of an average user was significantly improved. Leisure time became play time with games. Social parties were filled with app-talk. Jog time also meant use another application to track jogs. And many more. Creating the applications was not particularly easy, but money at the end of the pipe lured lots of developers to come in.

Now there is an ocean of smart phones with touch screens, fantastic hardware, and a promise of rich applications are making their way into market. I hope that applicaiton development becomes even more easier.

Gaming and Education vs. Gaming and Economics

Yesterday I had a lively conversation about computer games. We observed that the use of computer and console games peak in advanced economies of the world like United States, England, Japan, etc. At the same time we found that gaming use is limited in big countries like India and China. Why so?

It is easy to associate higher levels of education in advanced economies. It is equally easy to associate that the advanced economies also have advanced economic condition - meaning both disposable income and disposable time that allows the citizens to afford the costly consoles and games. Despite continued price wars, owning and using computer or console games easily can set one back by several hundred dollars. This means that only families or individuals who can afford the same will buy these gaming systems.

In United States or Japan, console games have been a stable diet for the past 30 years. Each generation of game consoles have grown the number of users who can play these games. Now easily we have a world wide penetration of 100M+ households with game consoles. I doubt if this penetration ever reached 1B mark! 1B+ mark is reserved for cell phones - more about that another day. There are numerous reported studies that indicate gaming can help brain to grow - especially games that involve strategy and tact. I had observed personally that several nerds (okay ... really smart people) have a very high disposition towards console games. These are also usually pretty educated people - who can earn and afford high priced gadgets like the console games. If indeed games foster education and easy learning - many do, why would the emerging economies not invest in getting game consoles?

A certain level of education guarantees certain level of economic livelihood and leisure time. Read Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.) for compelling arguments. Now if we look at countries like India or China, there is a strong desire for education. Parents invest a LOT of energy and money (may be not money in $$ terms) to educate their kids. At the same time there is no critical mass of economically affordable population to afford time and money to buy into the console lifestyle. Instead if I may call the current generation as the 'A generation' for the Asian kids, they are all learning to get educated and get settled well economically. Definitely the 'B generation' and 'C generation' - the youngsters of the 'A generation' will be able to afford more time and money to get game consoles ... paving path for new environment.

I expect that more game console distributions will happen alongside the growth in educated and economically settled population.

There is a massive counter argument to consider as well. Gaming happens when there is no other viable alternative even if game consoles were available. In United States, it is well proven over the many years of observation that the game players have other activities on the christmas day (celebrating christmas of course) or during big ball game days. In those days the console game usage declines a lot. Similarly we can expect the kids in India (if not China) having a better weather to play outside and not be huddled inside the home to play console games. Not to mention the continued power outage and that too planned power outages do not give the right environment for games to be played.

Perhaps with the arrival of 4.6 Billion phones, games will be a hit on the cell phones.

Youtube Therapy - with right selections

Yesterday we watched a few videos on YouTube. Mind you - these are watched my 5 year old. We selected lullabies and piano renderings. Wow! what a collection - there are so many videos out there with nice (mostly amateur) performances. It was definitely relaxing and enjoyable. It is amazing to see the creativity of millions of people. Not to mention the creativity of the founders of youtube to harness the potential and bring this to millions of people.

I wish Youtube had a way to set parental or content control settings to ensure we can let my daughter watch selective videos. Perhaps we also need a way to just select the right content for me at the right time. Need to play with Youtube more.

Sit and Chat Time

Finally yesterday I had the time to sit and chat about what is happening around us. We had a very beautiful (almost) summer day - sunny and bright - that is a rarity in the pacific northwest. It was nice and relaxing to sit and chat. We found nice Crate and Barrel's wicker sofa to sit down having the sun shine on us.

We talked about our life - how we started, where we are, and where we are going. Lots of exciting fun and painful topics came up. We inventoried our current worry list. The best part was that we had conquered and solved all the past worry items. I am sure the current ones will fall off the list too.

Okay back to the sofa. We had ordered a sofa as well. Not from Crate and Barrel, but from Costco. The sofa is to arrive today for our patio. We are looking forward to this in our backyard. We can relax and enjoy the backyard. Our new sofa also will have a confirguration in which we can assemble it as a sleeping sofa. This summer will be fantastic.