Simon Fabri

This blog explores different aspects of what it takes to create great tech products. It is meandering journey as I amble around from topic to topic driven by where my curiosity takes me. Sometimes I try to explore different aspects of what makes truly great tech teams, while at other times I try to get under the skin of the latest tech hype or understand what's going on in a particular industry. This blog started off with a distinct IoT flavour, but now is fairly tech-agnostic.

Happenings in the World of Artificial Intelligence

While much of the tech media have been focusing on the goings on at the Mobile World Congress, some of the more interesting stories of the week are to be found elsewhere. While the differences between this year’s smartphones and last year’s models are becoming increasingly difficult to discern, the same is not true for the goings on in the world of Artificial Intelligence. Already a topic of a blog post of mine a short time ago, there have been some particularly … Read more…

Amazon Dash – this genuinely deserves the ‘Internet of Things’ tag

The Internet of Things hype continues unabated, with companies allegedly hiring Chief IoT officers, though a quick search on the Indeed website failed to throw up any ads. However, today I came across a news item that genuinely deserves a bit of hype. While all sorts of technologies and products get pitched as an IoT play, Amazon’s Dash service is a genuine internet of things application. In a nutshell this service allows companies to use Amazon as a fulfilment service … Read more…

Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo – read, despite the dodgy title

The Christmas break often provides me with some time to catch up with my reading list, and lost amongst my ever-growing pile was Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0. Now, I very nearly did not buy this book, as am often put off by titles that smack of pompous management jargon, and “Management 3.0” flies very close to the wind on that front. However am glad that I rescued it from the pile of the great unread, as it is quite a … Read more…

What’s behind Musk’s OpenAI Initiative?

For my first blog post of 2016, I thought it time to take a cursory look at OpenAI, the non-for-profit organisation being set up by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. This aims to provide a non-commercial basis for furthering research into Artificial Intelligence, publishing and widely disseminating the output of research carried. To this end, $1 billion worth of funding has been pledged (or ‘donated’) by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. Silicon Valley … Read more…

Blockchains – from Digital Currency to Physical Things

A sure sign that a once-emerging technology is becoming mainstream is it being given the full front-page treatment by The Economist. This is what happened to “blockchain” technology, the set of cryptographic techniques that underpin Botcoin, the digital currency, when The Economist referred to it as The Next Big Thing. While I am pretty certain that most that esteemed magazine’s readers would never have come across the term blockchain before, the article was not short of hyperbole, equating its invention in the … Read more…

Talk to me – The role of Voice Control in the Smart Home

A recent Smart Home report on what features are most desired by users showed that in addition to self-adjusting thermostats, remote locking of burglar alarms and other such staples, one of the features that users really want is a master remote for all services. This is an expression of the frustration with the morass of incompatibility between smart devices.  Very few systems talk to each other in a meaningful way and it is clear that the fragmentation of standards and systems continues to cause … Read more…

Google OnHub – the router is now cylindrical

Following Amazon’s echo media device, Google have just unveiled an equally-cylindrical device, their all-singing, all-dancing WiFi router, built by home networking specialists TP-Link. Now I am a bit confused about this. Designed to be attractive and pretty enough placed anywhere in the home, Google seem to have forgotten that the location of WiFi routers are dictated by where the Internet cable enters the home. However, Google make big claims about its wireless performance, apparently sporting 13 antennas, emphasising the speed and range benefits it … Read more…

Lean Enterprise – Lean Startup for Grown ups

We have already seen how Eric Ries’ Lean Startup established the language and a culture of predominantly mobile-app start-ups over the past five years. The reality however, is that most of us do not work in start-ups where business models are unknown, and regular pivots are required to find out what works. Instead, most people in the tech field are employed for companies with established and (normally) profitable business models, and business processes tuned to support those business models. These companies are often large, … Read more…

Qualcomm and Samsung in new IoT chip product announcements

This has been a busy couple of weeks in terms of Internet of Things technology announcements. In particular, two titans from the mobile space, Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm are attempting to catch up with Intel with processors aimed at all manufacturers of ‘things’. Qualcomm announces two new products for its $1 billion IoT segment Qualcomm are making a very strong push in its “Internet of Everything” as its smartphone technology portfolio which is no longer benefiting from growth rates it was previously accustomed … Read more…

Comparing the Cloud giants – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure

Last month saw a number of number of the tech giants provide their most recent quarterly earnings. For both Amazon and Microsoft, their cloud activities gained a lot of headlines and column-inches in both the technical and business press. Although adopting different growth and technology strategy, their cloud computing offerings represent a significant engine of growth going forward, and is becoming an area of ever-more intense competition. Here we take a brief look at how they compare and what the … Read more…

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