I called that theoretical technology the "Browser Deflector Shield," evoking the defensive force field technology from "Star Trek." 

Shortly after, a company named Invincea actually implemented something very similar to what I described.

Invincea uses host-based virtualization technology on Windows desktops in order to provide the isolation for the browser, as well as a proprietary detection engine which will destroy and reset the virtual machine should any malware be detected.

While isolating the browser is certainly a good idea, there may be a better way of protecting desktop PC users from malware. That technology is micro-virtualization, or a "Microvisor."

I had a chance this week to speak for some time with Simon Crosby, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bromium, a company that is one of the first to market with a Microvisor security solution for desktop PCs, called vSentry. 

If Crosby's name rings a bell, that's because he was formerly chief technology officer of Citrix, and is the co-founder of XenSource, the company that first commercialized the Xen hypervisor, the very same that powers the core of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its EC2 public cloud. XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007.

Bromium vSentry is quite different from other virtualization technology that exists in the datacenter and on the desktop or even in mobile today.

vSentry is a "thin" hypervisor and does not manage hardware resources like a Type-1 hypervisor, like Microsoft's Hyper-V, which is built into Windows 8 Pro and Windows Server 2012, or like VMware ESX as part of the vSphere/vCloud suite, or even Xen for that matter. 

It also does not behave like or perform the same function as a typical Type-2 desktop virtualization product, like VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop or Oracle VirtualBox.

The vSentry microvisor sits on top of an existing operating system that manages the hardware resources like Type-2 hypervisor might, however it makes heavy use of the hardware virtualization extensions (VT-x and VT-d) present in the current generation x86 processors.

And rather than managing the hardware, it strictly manages how operating system processes are created and destroyed, rather than creating new instances of a hosted operating system itself.

The closest type of technology I could compare a microvisor like Bromium vSentry to is something like a "containerized" solution, such as Solaris Zones or Parallels Virtuozzo/OpenVZ, where a root/privileged operating system copies out clones of itself in memory to create pseudo-servers with unique libraries, configuration files and application storage all isolated into their own region of memory, all running on top of a shared kernel instance.

This is also referred to as "OS Virtualization."

OS Virtualization is a highly efficient way of virtualizing servers and applications, but has mostly been confined to the UNIX and Linux space.

Microsoft Research has conducted some initial work and has published various academic papers on an operating system virtualization project called "Drawbridge," which has many of the same characteristics as Solaris Zones and OpenVZ, as well as some significant architectual improvements to the basic concept. But so far it has not made its way into Windows. 

(I realize this stuff sounds very geeky and borderline nerdy, and most of you are nodding off at this point, but bear with me.)

Bromium's and micro-virtualization's key purpose is not to virtualize apps or operating systems in order to increase datacenter density and maximize resource utilization, although that may be a pleasant side effect. The purpose of Bromium vSentry is to virtualize every single process that is launched by a user or spawned by an application.

Still with me? OK, great. Here's a picture that sheds a bit more light on this.

In the Bromium systems architecture, every time the user fires up an application — and let's say for the sake of simplicity that this is a Web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome — it's isolated into its own virtual machine called a "Micro-VM".

A Micro-VM puts the application on a "need-to-know" basis, and only provisions out exactly what it needs in order to function. For example, it doesn't have access to every library on the system; only the ones that it needs to run.

Applications may have multiple processeses running within them, such as multiple tabs in a Web browser. In this case, a browser tab as well as any plugins inside them would be given their own Micro-VM. There are no "child" virtual machine processes, only parallel Micro-VM processes, all running within the microvisor's "ring of trust".

Now here is where things get interesting. When the application or the process within the application is closed, that Micro-VM also dies. Any malware that may have entered the system via that process is destroyed along with it.

Bromium also introduces the concept of "copy on write," which clones out system resources like dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) as well as things like user profiles and data into temporary memory, so the original copy cannot be affected if an attack takes place. 

But Bromium also pre-emptively inspects every single Micro-VM for the telltale signs of a malware attack, and uses crowdsourcing for determining if the process is being attacked.

For instance, if you are visiting a website and get hit with a redirect/cross-site scripting or a phishing attempt, it employs what the company refers to as Live Attack Visualization and Analysis (LAVA), which uses the behavioral signature of the attack to determine that it needs to shut down the virtual machine and notify the user before the compromise actually occurs. This includes sophisticated malware attacks including those that utilize polymorphism as well as rootkits and boot-kits.

Bromium's intention is to share these behavioral patterns through an open standard, so all anti-malware products as well as open source projects can reap the benefits.

Today, Bromium vSentry is restricted to running "on-the-metal" on Windows-based desktop PCs and servers, and cannot currently sit on top of an existing hypervisor platform. But there is no reason why this architecture could not be implemented in existing hypervisor platforms to provide this process isolation for Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) through a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or virtualized session-based computing.

Bromium vSentry is able work with session-based desktop computing now, using an "on the metal" session host running Microsoft RDS or Citrix XenApp.

The fundamental technology could also be ported to Linux, or even to the Mac. Additionally, once virtualization acceleration technology makes its way onto ARM-based SoCs in the next few years, the same principles of micro-virtualization could also be used on mobile devices as well, including smartphones and tablets running different OSes.

Could micro-virtualization be the killer technology that rids the world from malware once and for all? Talk back and let me know. 

For the last several years, he's been writing seasonal posts that contains his best picks for matched components so that you can build a good performance low-cost PC yourself, instead of going to the Tier-1 OEMs, like HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo.

If you're putting together a PC whose components cost you $300 to source, you are not shrewd. You are a schmuck.

I enjoy his posts immensely. I really do. I love PC components. I used to build PCs, usually once a year or so, sometimes more, for family and friends. I've built from scratch at least a hundred systems over the course of my professional involvement in the computer industry since the late 1980s. Perhaps even more, now that I think about it.

But now, unless you're an edge case, it doesn't make sense. I stopped building PCs a long time ago. 

If you want a "cheap and cheerful PC to handle some simple tasks" you shouldn't be surfing the web for parts and then blowing an entire Sunday afternoon putting it together thinking you've saved a hundred dollars and gotten oh-so-much-better-components for your hard-earned money.

Look, I'm going to be blunt. If you're putting together a PC whose components cost you $300 to source, you are not shrewd. You are a schmuck.

I didn't have to look very long to find very similar, fully-built PCs manufactured by Tier 1 vendors that cost approximately $300. A simple search of the usual suspects yielded these results:

Best Buy:

• Dell Inspiron 660s 4GB RAM 1TB ($319) (Small form factor, built-in wireless networking)
• $34.99) 

Amazon:

• Lenovo IdeaCentre Q190 ($339.99) (Ultra-thin, sleek form factor, wireless) 
• Gateway 4GB RAM 1TB AMD A4-5300 ($349.99) Small form factor

Newegg:

• Lenovo H520S 4GB RAM 1TB ($329) (Small form factor, built-in wireless networking)

Microsoft Store:

• ASUS VivoBook X202E Touchscreen Ultrabook ($399)

This is just a representative sample and I haven't scrounged the web for better deals, of which I am absolutely positive there are if you are willing to invest more time than the whole 10 minutes I put into it. And by the way, that ASUS VivoBook deal at the Microsoft Store? ZDNet's Ed Bott told me about it, and I'd jump on it quick if you need a new and inexpensive notebook system.

You could argue that Adrian's bill of materials is about 20 or 30 dollars cheaper than the systems above, and his components may be slightly higher speced, but I will add the following:

• Every single one of these PCs comes with a Windows 8 license. Unless you're using Linux, or are re-using a valid retail, non-OEM Windows 7 license that isn't currently running on another computer, you'll need a copy of Windows for this PC.
• Software piracy isn't cool. If you need a new Windows 8 license, you will need to buy the System Builder DVD, which I found on Amazon for $95.
• Every single one of these PCs comes with a keyboard and mouse. That's worth about 20-30 bucks right there.
• Every single one of these computers has 1-year warranty, and is sold by a online vendor with good customer service and return policies. This in and of itself is not insubstantial especially if you think you can cut corners with OEM bulk "Grey-box" system builder parts which do not have the same warranties of their retail boxed counterparts.

I've said a number of times in the past that PC building no longer makes sense for most people. I have gone into the reasons at length on various occasions, but the bottom line is that cost should not be a determining factor in being your own system builder.

Adrian is by and large addressing the hobbyist that actually enjoys putting computers together. The average end-user should not even consider going this route, no matter how much easier it has gotten to assemble a PC since 25 years ago when I first started doing this. 

I can understand to some extent, but am less than fully convinced that it may still make sense to build an extremely high-end system for an ever-shrinking demographic of extreme PC gaming folks and for engineering and graphical workstations, but for the average end-user that needs a basic system for the reasons Adrian has specified? Heck no.

When was the last time you actually built a PC? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

Advances in Treknology

In September 1966, the NBC television network released an iconic but short-lived series that would inspire generations of inventors to bring about changes in our daily lives with technology that was once within the realms of strictly science fiction.

The original series, based on a "Wagon train to the Stars" western turned sci-fi adventure concept envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, Dorothy C Fontana, and Matt Jefferies, ran for a total of three seasons from 1966 to 1969. Many films and subsequent revival series have since graced television and film in the nearly 50 years since the airing of the initial pilot.

The original series was re-envisioned with a new cast as a major motion picture in 2009, and the sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, premieres this month, on May 16.

In the span of those four decades, many of the gadgets and technologies showcased in Star Trek and in the revival shows and feature films that followed it in the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s did eventually come to fruition.

In this gallery, we'll highlight some of the most important ones.

(Image: CBS)

The "Communicator"

Perhaps the most iconic of Trek gizmos that became reality was the device simply known as the "Communicator," a palm-sized walkie-talkie with a flip-out antenna that allowed crew members to communicate with each other while in the field, and allowed the Enterprise to geo-locate and communicate with the away team from orbit on any planet they happened to have beamed down on.

The real-life version of the "Communicator" became the mobile phone, which was invented by Dr. Martin Cooper of the Motorola corporation, and released in April 1973.

Cooper admitted to being inspired by the original Star Trek show as the driving force behind the device that now permeates virtually all of modern society. The original real-life "Communicator" was brick-sized, but Motorola eventually released the appropriately named StarTAC in 1996, which was a dead ringer for the Trek original.

Today, flip-style cell phones that look like the original Communicator have largely given way to more powerful touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy, but without Star Trek, we probably wouldn't have seen either of them.

The true Communicator didn't use cell towers — it was able to broadcast over huge distances, and allowed crew members to communicate both planet-wide and to the ship in orbit without the use of any support infrastructure.

We haven't gotten there yet, and we sort of failed with mass adoption of global-capable Communicator tech with Iridium, but modern cell phones do permeate our lives, and we do have the ability now to locate each other with built-in GPS capabilities, which the Enterprise was able to do for its crew members.

In 2009, Google introduced the Latitude service, which allows anyone carrying a GPS-capable smartphone running Google Maps to be visually located by their friends, so we're getting closer to the "True" Trek Communicator.

(Image: CBS)

The Federation communications earpiece

The cell/mobile phone was not the only aspect of Trek communications technology that made it to reality.

The wireless earpiece, which both communications officer Lt. Uhura and science officer Spock were known to have used on a number of occasions on the show, also became a reality as the Bluetooth Headset, which is also a Motorola innovation.

Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in August 2011.

(Image: CBS)

Flat-panel displays

Star Trek has had so many computer and information-related technologies showcased in it over the years that it's very hard to tell where the science starts and the fiction ends.

While many of the IT advances in Star Trek haven't made it yet — such as true artificial intelligence, as featured in the Enterprise's shipboard computer system or Lieutenant Commander Data, many aspects of Trek IT have managed to filter their way into our daily lives.

Display technology is probably the biggie.

While you can hardly credit Star Trek for inventing the CRT, you can certainly see how the show has probably inspired generations of engineers to create LCD flat screens and HD widescreen wall-mounted displays, which were simply called "Viewers" or "Viewscreens" on the original show.

It should probably also be mentioned that the telepresence technology using video feeds for ship-to-ship communication first shown in 1966 is now commonplace, using technologies such as Skype, Google Hangout, and Apple FaceTime in addition to corporate video conferencing products such as Microsoft Lync, Citrix GotoMeeting, Cisco WebEx, and Cisco Jabber.

However, it should be noted that social norms have limited their actual adoption, and voice communication, while now more advanced than ever before with the advent of VoIP and digital signal processing, is still the way most people like to do things if they aren't texting or emailing.

(Image: CBS)

Tablet computers

My favorite of these display technologies is the PADD, or the Personal Access Display Device. Although the term was coined later in 1987 with the release of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, it did actually make an appearance a few times in the original show, where it was used by various engineers and administrative staff.

Today, aspects of the PADD can be found in Apple's 9.7-inch and 7-inch iPad, dozens of Android-based tablets, and Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, such as the Microsoft Surface.

(Image: CBS)

The Enterprise computer and data banks

In addition to advanced display technology, human/computer voice interaction as featured on the many Star Trek series has also been implemented in various forms.

While most of us do not interact with our computers by talking, voice dictation using products such as Nuance's NaturallySpeaking (originally developed at IBM) allows for limited and specialized application by using voice commands and voice dictation.

"Expert" voice recognition systems used by airlines, telecommunications, and utility companies use voice recognition for accelerating call center screening. Although, when I use them, I tend to yell "Operator!" at the top of my lungs.

Apple's introduction of Siri in the iPhone 4, and Google's introduction of Google Now in Android 4.2, are "intelligent agents" that allow for retrieval of information from the internet using voice queries, and work eerily the way the original Enterprise computer did.

Star Trek's "Memory bank" technology, which enabled the crew and various alien civilizations to record and play back music and video in digital form, has also made its appearance as some of the most popular consumer electronic devices in the world — as iPods, portable media players, and digital video recorders, as well as Secure Digital and CompactFlash memory storage cards and the latest solid-state disk drives.

And the subspace Federation communications network and database that we've seen crew members use to access any kind of information at their fingertips is probably analogous to both the internet and the cloud.

(Image: CBS)

Sickbay

The "Sickbay" on the Enterprise was a medical science marvel, filled with all sorts of fantastic tools with the capability to diagnose virtually any ailment in existence and perform complex surgeries on life-threatened patients with virtually no blood spilled.

While we've got a long way to go until we get the full set of medical tools that was available to Dr. McCoy, quite a few of Trek's medical gizmos have left their influence on real-life healthcare technology.

The magical diagnostic bed that displayed all sorts of metrics on patient vital signs that was used on the original series did eventually come to fruition as various independent diagnostic and health monitoring equipment used in hospitals today.

One of those is the LifeBed, which is a near-dead ringer for Dr. McCoy's sickbay. Similar diagnostic equipment has been used aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and in mobile field hospitals in the military. Naturally, advanced medical imaging technologies inspired by the original series and Next Generation sickbays made their way into CT and MRI equipment, which are a staple of modern medical diagnosis.

(Image: CBS)

Hypospray and non-invasive surgery

McCoy's "Hypospray," which allowed for instantaneous, bloodless, and needle-free liquid injections, hasn't quite made it in terms of handheld portability yet to every medical office, but a real-life equivalent for use in mass-dosage scenarios exists as the jet injector, and is used for vaccinations by the Department of Defense and other government and relief agencies around the world.

While the truly non-invasive surgery employed on the original Star Trek and TNG shows for generalized use still remains largely science fiction, some procedures such as Stereotactic Radiosurgery for treating specific types of tumors, allow for non-invasive surgery on brain tissue using focused radiation beams.

And while the hand-held directed energy "Phaser" guns used for combat against hostile aliens still remain a fantasy, LASIK surgery using focused low-wattage lasers to correct vision is now well on its way to making eye glasses and contact lenses obsolete.

(Image: CBS)

The "Vorta Command" headset

First shown in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the command headset employed by the Dominion "Vorta" overseers of the brutal Jem'Hadar forces was used to have complete situational awareness while piloting their attack ships.

Today, we know this product as Google Glass.

(Image: CBS)

The "Replicator"

One of the most awe-inspiring technologies that has been in every single one of the Star Trek series has been the "Replicator," a device that is able to produce any object, of any complexity, either inorganic or organic in nature, whether it be food or machines, purely by combining raw matter and energy from patterns stored in the computer and re-arranging particles at a sub-atomic level.

In Star Trek, the "Replicator" was an offshoot of the "Transporter" technology that allowed for de-materialization and re-materialization of objects and beings at vast distances.

While this sort of power over pure matter and energy is probably hundreds, if not thousands, of years beyond our current reach, the "Replicator" is here in a much more primitive form as the 3D printer, which can produce fairly complex objects for rapid prototype and manufacture using any number of materials, including plastics, metals, and also proteins and other organic substances.

I've discussed the changes in social norms that will be needed if wearable computing truly becomes mainstream.

I've warned about the potential for misuse and abuse if Glass' software becomes compromised, and if hacked devices get in the hands of sociopaths.

I've talked about the potential industry pitfalls for Glass, as well as a potential path for monetization success in addition to various applications in vertical markets.

I've made suggestions for possible design improvements in successive iterations of the product.

And finally, I've taken a peek into the future, some 20 years hence, to see what the future of augmented reality might look like if we take the technology to its logical conclusion: Complete integration with the human brain, as depicted in the 1983 Douglas Trumbull film Brainstorm.

Human to cybernetic interfaces like I described in the last piece are probably a long ways off.

But if we are to take Glass at face value, and if we are to acknowledge that this is a potential path (of which I believe there are many) for personal computing, then we should probably explore what the near future might bring.

Today, we refer to Glass and other potential products that might emerge like it as "wearable computing devices". I include devices such as smart watches  like the rumored "iWatch"  and other wrist-mounted computing devices in this category as well.

I have a better term for this that I think might be catchy. Glass is a Cybernetic Headband, or a "Cyband" for short.

Today, Glass is the only Cyband on the market. But there could be others.

Google is attempting to set a standard with Glass by being the first product on the market. Sometimes, you succeed in that approach, and sometimes you fail. The market and consumer response is what determines the end result.

What if ... instead of there being different, competing Cyband hardware with embedded OSes and their own application standards, we were to take a completely vendor-neutral approach? What if Cybands were simply just peripherals that talked wirelessly to smartphones and other computing devices using open standards?

First and foremost, I beleive there should be certain basic design principles and assumptions about what Cybands should be.

A Cyband should not be a standalone computing device. Google Glass violates this basic principle out of the box by running on a sophisticated, power-hungry SoC with a complex embedded OS, with large amounts of localized storage, which in turn requires a smartphone or a wireless network to provide the necessary cloud connectivity.

This is wasteful, not just on power consumption, but also computing resources, and adds a layer of complexity and security risk that is currently unnaceptable.

A Cyband should be a Bluetooth 4.0/wi-fi device that acts strictly as an external sensor network and human interface controls for another computing device, such as a smartphone, which in turn provides the application logic and presentation layer to the Cyband.

It should use a low-power microcontroller, such as an ARM Cortex M, to provide basic firmware and control logic, nothing more.

A correct implementation of a Cyband as I define this today would be the Pebble smartwatch, for example, even though its capabilities are limited. Something a bit closer to a full-capability, vendor-neutral Cyband might be the soon-to-be released m100 by Vuzix.

Sensors on a Cyband would include cameras, eye and hand gesture detection, microphones, GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, heartbeat/pulse monitors, pedometers, proximity detectors, and photocells, induction charging components, battery monitoring, signal monitoring (such as to determine Bluetooth or wi-fi signal health), as well as RFID tags for "Antiglass" policy enforcement.

A human feedback control would include the monocular display, touch sensor(s), and buttons, as well as audio playback, among others.

To tie all of this together, you would need a published, open standard for a Cyband communications API that could be adopted by anyone that produces smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and the OSes they run on.

This means that if you had a Cyband, you could use it interchangeably on systems that ran Android, iOS, Mac OS, and any variant of Windows. Each of these OSes could have "Cyband presentation and interaction modes" for applications running on those platforms.

Today, we have similar open specifications for networking, microphone input, and audio streaming with Bluetooth 4.0. The various operating systems implement their support differently, however it's pretty much a given that if you have a Bluetooth device that meets a certain minimum specification, it works with all OSes provided that they also meet those specifications and support all of the device's capabilities.

Such would be the same with Cybands. And because Cybands would essentially be Bluetooth headsets (and wristbands) on sensor and feedback steroids, any of the usual suspects, such as Plantronics, Logitech, SONY, LG, Jabra, Jawbone, Bose, and Sennheiser could make them, among the obvious others.  

This would bring the cost of Cybands down to reasonable levels, and allow all of the application platforms that support augmented reality, lifelogging, and wearable computing to win (or lose) mindshare on their respective merits.

Do we need an open specification for Cybands? Talk back and let me know. 

We've seen its use described in popular science-fiction novels and shown in movies and television (like "Star Wars" and "Star Trek") and has been the fodder of futurists for longer than I can possibly remember.

There's no question that these devices will be used extensively, particularly in vertical markets for specific types of applications where hands-free computing has distinct advantages, such in the medical and military fields, as well as in breaking news reporting.

But products like Google Glass will face numerous adoption challenges because they present issues in any number of social situations where privacy or desire to be "off the record" is most cherished.

One might ask, why are privacy issues with Glass any different than any other device that can record, such as a smartphone or a miniature tablet?

They are absolutely different. Today, even with cameras on smartphone handsets, recording in certain areas is frowned upon, but at least there is time for the object of the recording to raise an objection and ask for the device to be put away. 

Because Glass is being worn, and might eventually be integrated into prescription eyewear, it's a "stealth" recording device. The object of the recording may not know they've been captured on video until it is too late. And, the device's ability to transmit that footage to the public-viewable cloud nearly instantaneously with a 4G or Wi-Fi connection will make it much more feared than a simple camera with localized storage.

In the "Explorer" edition of Google Glass that has now shipped to celebrity early adopters and developers, there is no indication whatsoever that the subject is being recorded.

Contrary to early reports, there is no LED or light or anything of the sort to alert that a video or a picture is being taken. This might be changed in mass-market versions of the device produced by licensing OEMs, but for now, one should assume that if Glass' 720p 5-megapixel CMOS sensor is pointed at you, you're on Candid Camera.

Glass and similar products that enter the market because of their potential for recording images and video in a stealthy fashion will be unwelcome in any place that people gather and expect some degree of privacy, and new social norms will have to be developed for their use as well as establishment of etiquette for obtaining the consent of those being recorded.

What about prescription versions of Glass? Won't it make it harder to remove them from people in social situations?

First, we're making a very big assumption that Google can get the eyewear industry to cooperate by licensing this technology. Google is probably not going to want to get into the eyewear business because there are too many styles, and people view their eyewear styles as being a very personal fashion choice. 

That being said, the balance of the designer eyeglass frame as well as the prescription eyeglass retail business, as well as the distribution channels for prescription eyewear — with the exception of Costco and Wal-Mart, which are loss leaders in this area — is effectively a monopoly controlled by the Luxottica Group S.p.A, based in Milan, Italy, which generates over €7 billion in net sales annually, based on their last financial statement.

Virtually every design patent for every licensed eyeglass brand you can think of is controlled by this firm. If Google even wants to play in this arena, it will be on Luxottica's terms. If you think Apple is litigious with protecting design patents, just imagine what Luxottica will do if it suspects Google is attempting to intrude on its business.

More than likely, I think that anyone who is serious about using these sort of devices will opt to use contact lenses or elect for corrective laser surgery, and they can simply just remove the device if someone takes offense to it being used.

• Video: Sticker Shock: Why are eyeglasses so expensive? (CBS 60 Minutes)

And again, if Luxottica feels its long-term business is threatened by the device in any way that could potentially lead toward a downward trend in the use of prescription eyewear, God help Google.

For those too squeamish for corrective surgery or contact lenses, a "clip-on" version of Glass is likely to enter the market.

And the potential for backlash?

Well, there's already backlash to Google Glass. The fact that terms like "Glasshole" and "Doucheglass" are being bandied about already means that the general public finds the product and their users to be obnoxious.

There will be Glass-free signs posted in businesses of all kinds. I can certainly see them being banned from any number of public spaces under local ordinances passed which may govern when and where they cannot be used.

They will be prohibited from being used in schools due to concerns over student distraction and possible cheating. Government buildings will almost certainly prohibit them, as will airport security. There will be incidents of "Glass Rage" where people will get into fights over their use.

And there are probably scenarios for backlash we haven't even thought of yet.

Despite the clear privacy issues and challenges that Google will face with the eyewear industry, I do think that these devices will inevitably enter the mainstream, despite restrictions that will be imposed on their use.

If Luxottica feels its long-term business is threatened by the device in any way potentially that could lead toward a downward trend in the use of prescription eyewear, God help Google.

I think there will be an initial surge for prosumers/professionals and verticals at $800 with a mass adoption price point at about $500, with universal adoption at about $250.

That Android runs at the core of Glass is probably a good thing, at least for Google's device. Android is a known quantity when it comes to software development.

However, the type of apps we will see for augmented reality use are likely to be very different than what is used on a smartphone. I expect these to be more of the "telemetry" type apps that are simply extensions of things running remotely on a Bluetooth-connected smartphone, not unlike how current smart watches work.

I believe augmented reality wearable computers are likely to enter the industry by more than just Google, and there will be different ways to market the geotargeting aspects of the technology.

The obvious one will be augmented reality superimposed advertisements that hook directly into Google Ads, but there's huge potential for noise here. 

Google has stated that no advertisements will be allowed in third-party apps on Glass. I think it is highly unlikely that Google is going to make Glass an advert-free zone. It is far more likely that it intends to reserve ad network promotion for basic device functionality so that app developers cannot abuse the system. 

More likely the advertising on the device will have to be targeted according to the user's Google+ profile and to search context, through queries such as "Okay Glass, show me pizzerias in a one mile radius."

Based on my "+1" of pizza restaurants on Google+, I could see the device popping up overlays if I'm near a particularly good one, such as a place with a particularly high Zagat rating. And it might even show me pizza restaurants that have paid for particularly high AdWords placement as well.

What we think of "advertisement" will be defined entirely by how much Google "juice" an AdWords customer is willing to pay for in order to get in front of literally as many eyeballs as possible. These will not be "pitches" for product as such, but jostling for position on an augmented overlay.

Geotargeted and context and query-based visual augmentation will almost certainly make up the bulk of the revenue model, at least initially.

But I also see Glass as a supplemental ecosystem for the existing Google Play application store, particularly for Android smartphone apps that have the ability to extend their reach into the new device through "telemetry" or Glass-optimized user interfaces.

There may be other types of Glass-oriented content that Google is looking for developers to produce that the wearers can consume and can be monetized. Perhaps industry or interest-specific augmentation overlays, much like the way dictionary add-ons for word processing packages were sold to the medical and legal industry in the 1980s.

In terms of enhancing our overall communications and collaboration experience, I'm not yet convinced it is going to raise the bar. We already have the capability to do pretty sophisticated video chat and video conferencing with smartphones and PCs and it still only has limited use.

Where I do see this making some impact is in social networking. Clearly this would be a win for Google+ and a blow to Facebook. "Liking" and "friending" people could be an act of simply pointing at an icon floating in space over somebody's head, as opposed to having to look up their profile.

The adult film industry will certainly use this device with consent, but imagine what unscrupulous, ethically-challenged sociopaths might do with Glass. 

Status updates could be dictated and photo-sharing services like Instagram could be made obsolete. So it might add some transparency to Social Networking as opposed to it being the chore that it is today.

Still, I think the technology platform has to prove itself before it becomes more than just a more sophisticated replacement to existing Bluetooth headsets. 

At the moment Glass uses very commodity system-on-a-chip (SoC) with fairly off the shelf display, camera and battery tech. Google will need to develop the technology a little further if wants to put devices on the market that are usable for more than just a few hours at a time and can really make use of the life-logging capabilities as opposed to running out of gas after 20 minutes of video recording.

They will need much lower-power SoCs and more sophisticated battery chemistry, so that the majority of the heavy lifting is done by a wireless tethered smartphone instead. Google can certainly get millions of Glass devices pumped out with the current reference design, but it may not be palatable in its current form due to short battery life.

Social and technology limitations aside, there is a significant vertical pivot in all of this. Medical, law enforcement, private security, scientific research, pharmaceutical, and aerospace. Any profession where hands-free device operation is an asset.

Even if Google Glass flops in terms of mass-market adoption, the vertical applications are tremendous, and on that alone the technology should be considered successful if it gets penetration into those industries.

There's another industry that Glass is going to get penetration, and it should be obvious to everyone — pornography.

Google may not intend the product to be used in that fashion, but let's face it, first-person, close-up perspective views of sex acts are as much the holy grail of the adult industry as wearable computing and life logging is in the collective consciousness of science fiction. In fact, the two have often come hand and hand with each other. 

For example, the production-cursed 1983 Douglas Trumbull film "Brainstrom" starring Natalie Wood and Christoper Walken depicts a lifelogging technology similar to Glass — which also has the ability to record sensation and emotion — that is misused and is exploited by one of its inventors to chronicle his bedroom exploits with women, and then share it with his colleagues.

The adult film industry will certainly use this device with consent, but imagine what unscrupulous, ethically-challenged sociopaths might do with Glass. 

If you think "sexting" is something to be wary of, and you're concerned about having your children exposed to it, that's nothing compared to what Glass has the potential to be misused for.

Google Glass will make some sort of industry impact in 2014. Whether that is strictly with early adopters, "prosumers" or use in vertical markets, this is difficult to say. It's also hard to tell this early on whether or not the product is acceptable in its current form given the limitations it has in terms of battery life and just how exactly it might be monetized by third-party developers.  

What is certain, however, is that there is a nearly universal negative reaction to the life-logging and stealth recording capabilities of the device. Regardless of how cheap Google Glass eventually becomes due to efficiencies in mass production, it's obnoxious and invasive at any price and its potential for abuse by the ethically challenged and sociopaths among us is virtually unlimited.

Is Google Glass an obnoxious technology at any price? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

This would be akin to the reference designs for Android smartphones created by Google, which companies like Samsung, HTC, and LG use to make their own licensed products today.

Executives at Google have indicated that Glass will ship to consumers sometime in 2014. Presumably, this is to debug aspects of the system and make improvements so that the market doesn't end up with a half-baked product with a limited application ecosystem at launch, like the first T-Mobile G1 Android handset did back in October 2008.

There are many ways in which an initial Glass consumer product can be improved over the existing "Explorer" edition that is now shipping to developers and first adopters. For starters, there's the issue of battery life.

Great Debate

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Everyone seems to have an opinion about Google's ground-breaking product.

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Currently, according to most reviews of the product published to date, the device only has about a five-hour battery life, and this is reduced to about 20 minutes of total recording time under battery power if the front-facing camera is used for 720p video capture.

Unlike smartphones and tablets, which can use as much as 80 percent of their surface area for battery compartments, Glass faces a number of challenges, essentially because it's a smartphone without a screen, with virtually no surface area to speak of.

The right side of the device holds a small casing that contains the SoC (system on a chip) as well as the 640x360 prism-mounted color display, the forward-facing 5MP CMOS sensor, the microphone, the bone conduction audio system, flash storage, and the support electronics for wireless networking and Bluetooth.

And oh, yes, the battery. All of which has to be packed into an extremely tight area.

So clearly, for Glass to evolve as a usable system, the art of miniaturization has to go a bit beyond what we expect from smartphones. The battery chemistry may need to be more exotic (and thus, probably more expensive) than what exists currently in smartphones, and the SoC design has to be lower power than anything that has been used on a smartphone to date.

Currently, Glass is able to do many tasks autonomously, provided that it has a wi-fi or Bluetooth connection to the internet. Because the SoC used now is of the "complex" and general-purpose variety that is similar to what is used in a smartphone, has a lot of onboard memory (like a smartphone), and runs a fully programmable OS (like a smartphone), it also consumes battery power in large amounts ... like a smartphone.

An alternative approach would be to make the next generation of Glass "dumb", essentially a thin client for the purposes of presenting application telemetry data from a remotely connected smartphone.

With a "dumb" Glass, one could use a very low-power "microcontroller" or ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) of a custom design that is optimized specifically to do the tasks that Glass needs to do, and thus would consume far less battery power.

Glass 2.0 should have a JeOS, possibly even a hardened, non-Linux kernel, with only a minimal amount of memory onboard, so that the tethered smartphone and the cloud it needs to talk to via wi-fi or Bluetooth is in fact doing the heavy lifting in terms of storage and compute.

Should Google choose to continue to use Android as the base OS for Glass, I would make it a design objective to use a secure boot and image validation technology, such has been developed by General Dynamics for its "GD Protected" suite, which includes numerous other security enhancements that should be considered not only for Glass, but for all Android smartphones.

By making Glass "dumb", there would be other advantages besides battery life. As I noted in my previous piece, Glass currently has no security controls that would prevent it from being hijacked and the data on it stolen.

Android and iOS embedded systems expert Jay Freeman, aka "Saurik", who recently published an account of how to root compromise a Glass device, suggested that Google implement a pin code procedure or a voiceprint to unlock the unit when it is not being used.

"Antiglass" would be a signal or trigger that disrupts the lifelogging capabilities of augmented reality devices. It's the Glass kill switch.

But I would go even further with this. Because of the large amounts of onboard storage, there's a lot of data that could be forensically retrieved from the unit, and since Glass currently runs on a sophisticated SoC on Linux rather than a simple microcontroller running on a rudimentary OS, the potential for compromise is significant even if a voiceprint or pin code is used to unlock the system.

In an ideal world, Glass would simply be a Bluetooth headset on steroids. It would only need a small cache to interact with its host smartphone for the card apps to function, and it would make sense to wipe the cache and disconnect from the network tether every time it is removed from the wearer's head.

There's another feature that I think, beyond everything else I've talked about, is paramount in order to get this technology accepted into the mainstream, and that is "Antiglass".

I talked a little about Antiglass in an earlier piece, about how social norms may need to change once Glass becomes popular.

In short, "Antiglass" would be a signal or trigger that disrupts the lifelogging capabilities of augmented reality devices. It's the Glass kill switch.

How this would actually get implemented might be tricky, but I've given some additional thought to this one.

I suspect that this might be possible through the use of RFID ARAT (Active Reader Active Tag) transmitters and tagging, provided that the ARAT tags were hard wired to the camera, and audio pickup electronics in Glass and were not accessible directly via the OS.

There would be many advantages to using this approach. First, it's a fairly "keep it simple, stupid" (KISS) solution, and RFID tagging is a mature and highly proven technology.

And at manufacturing scale, it should be fairly inexpensive for businesses and private individuals to install these Antiglass RFID transmitters in their buildings and homes.

Personal RFID ARAT transmitters could be incorporated into smartphones for those people who want to disrupt Glass and other lifelogging devices for a short distance (10'-100') and could be marketed as a value-added feature of new handsets.

Prosumer units intended for protecting small and medium-sized businesses with higher ranges (100'-200') may only cost a few hundred dollars to bring to market. Medium-range versions (200'-500') could be sold to organizations with larger areas to disrupt, whereas wide-cast, 2,000' versions could be used by federal, state, and local governments to "De-Glass" large public areas.

I feel strongly enough about the potential for Glass to be abused in the future that at bare minimum, an Antiglass initiative should be on the forefront of proposed telecommunications legislation in this country, requiring lifelogging augmented-reality device manufacturers such as Google to use this technology before the genie of personal lifelogging devices is let out of the bottle.

Do we need "Antiglass" technology as part of all lifelogging and augmented reality systems? Talk back and let me know.

Freeman has since released a lengthy account of how the exploit was accomplished, providing the bits and the procedure to repeat it, and has offered a number of warnings to the Glass community regarding just how ineffective the security on the device currently is.

I wanted to know from Freeman if, once rooted, it is possible to programmatically disable the "recording LED indicator" on the device, so that one could stealthily record without any indication to the subject that they are being captured on-camera.

As it turns out, there is no such indicator light on the "Explorer" version of Google Glass that has recently shipped to the first generation of users and developers who were lucky enough to get their hands on the headset. Duh.

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Everyone seems to have an opinion about Google's ground-breaking product.

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Still, there's room to make the device even stealthier. As Freeman explained to me during a phone interview, although there's no recording indicator per se, if you are being recorded, it's readily apparent from video activity being reflected off the wearer's eye prism that something is going on, particularly if you are in close proximity to the person.

But that can be changed once a Glass headset is rooted. Because Glass is an Android device, runs an ARM-based Linux kernel, and can run Android user space programs and custom libraries, any savvy developer can create code that modifies the default behavior in such a way that recording can occur with no display activity showing in the eye prism whatsoever.

And while the default video recording is 10 seconds, code could also be written that begins and stops recording for as long as needed with a custom gesture or head movement, or even with innocuous custom voice commands like: "Boy, I'm tired" to begin, and "Boy, I need coffee" to end it.

You could write and side load an application that polls the camera and takes a still photo every 30 seconds, should you, say, want to "case" and thoroughly photodocument a place of business prior to committing a crime. Or even engage in corporate espionage. Or simply capture ambient audio from unsuspecting people around you.

So while the 12.5GB of usable storage on this first version of Glass is fairly meager for storing HD video, it's plenty of space for storing still image JPG files and 64Kbps compressed audio. And that's not counting storage that could be accessed in the cloud in places like Dropbox, or even using a personal wi-fi connection to a smartphone with a large amount of internal memory.

The 5MP camera and the audio pickup of the current Glass Explorer Edition is fairly unspectacular. If an AOSP version of Glass's Android OS is ever published, there's certainly nothing to stop an OEM from producing a superior headset with optical zoom, a higher-resolution CMOS with superior light sensitivity, possibly even night vision, and significantly better microphones.

[Editor's note: Google has already released the specific source code bits that Glass uses that are a requirement of the company's commitment to using the GPLv2-licensed Linux kernel. However, this does not represent a full platform Open Source release of Glass's pre-loaded apps and complete run-time environment, which, like the rest of Android, would probably be licensed using Apache 2.0]

While Glass' current battery time is limited to about 5 hours of regular use and 20 minutes of run time while doing video recording, extended recording of video and audio could be accomplished through a thin USB connector wire (painted to match hair and skin color) hidden behind the neck, leading to a large external battery hidden in a coat or a vest such as, say, the $75 12000mah New Trent iCarrier that I carry with me on business trips to charge my smartphones.

Google intended the first version of Glass to look nerdy and clearly like a wearable computing device. But any number of techniques could be used to conceal the active components of the product through good industrial design and color blending, as well as through the use of prosthetics, makeup and hairstyles.

And if the existing Android OEM ecosystem is of any indication, it's a virtual certainty that we'll see Glass headsets that are licensed by third parties.

"Evil Glass" may include all the software necessary to turn a 14-year-old into a walking stealth surveillance device that would have been the envy of the Mossad or China's Ministry of State Security.

Once you have root on a Glass headset, any number of custom software packages could be installed without Google being able to prevent one from doing things that would make your hair stand on end, such as on-the-fly image and audio processing.

This is the kind of stuff that until now, only major intelligence agencies could do with very expensive surveillance equipment. Just wait until Israeli and Eastern European startups, which are staffed with former intelligence personnel who have a huge wealth of knowledge in using this kind of technology, get a hold of this thing.

There are tons of unlicensed Android phones and tablets being produced in China. Once the basic spec of Glass is available, there's nothing to stop an unscrupulous company in Asia from creating a Glass clone that's totally open without any hacking required.

And once Glass Explorer Edition's ROM makes it into the wild, all kinds of "Evil" re-spins can be produced to make the stock Glass into a Swiss Army surveillance kit for sociopaths, not just hackers.

Such an "Evil Glass" Android distribution may include all the software necessary to turn a 14-year-old into a walking stealth surveillance device that would have been the envy of the Mossad or China's Ministry of State Security only five or ten years ago.

So we know that once a headset is rooted, the wearer can do all sorts of stuff with the device that Google never intended for them to do with it, and there are Glass applications already in the mind's eye of malicious people ready to use them for nefarious purposes.

But what about stuff that isn't being perpetrated by the wearer? What if a Glass headset starts doing stuff without the wearer's knowledge?

Well, as it turns out, as Freeman so thoroughly documents and explains on his website, there's a lot of potential for that, too.

Because the current implementation of Glass has no "pin lock" like an Android phone or tablet has, the device is always active when it is turned on, and thus it would be relatively simple to inject a headset using a USB-connected device and the Android SDK with an exploit along with a malware playload that, say... snaps pictures and records audio of everything you do, and stores and forwards it over the internet to the hacker without the wearer's knowledge.

In short, if you buy a Glass device, don't let the thing out of your sight.

Will Glass be used to "do the evil" that Google has pledged it would never engage in? Talk back and let me know.

David Pogue of the New York Times was a little kinder. "It's basically an updated Galaxy S3" and "All told, nobody at the office will notice that you’ve bought the latest and greatest."

Ouch. Not exactly ringing endorsements from the two most influential computer and technology journalists in the mainstream.

Oh sure, us geeky technology writers can easily delve into the fact that the S4 is absolutely a spectactular technical achievement, we could micro-analyze every bit of minutiae about the product, and we'd be in remiss if we didn't acknowledge that it is clearly the top of the line (along with the HTC One) if you're going to consider a new Android smartphone.

But hey, I don't want to say I told you so, but, well... I told you so. I said that when the S4 was announced that it was just another Android phone and that when it came to the smartphone experience itself on Samsung devices, that the thrill was gone.

For all practical purposes the S4 was an exercise for Samsung to consolidate their supply chain and bring all of their manufacturing processes and components as well as much software as possible in-house. Important for Samsung, but for the end-user, not so much.

It would be simple to compartmentalize both Walt Mossberg and David Pogue as huge Apple fans that will easily dismiss anything that comes out of the Android camp.

One can certainly do that, and I think that based on their respective histories with being treated by Apple (and well, everyone else for that matter) with first nation status and their track record -- with few exceptions -- of stellar reviews of the company's products to date that such a viewpoint would be perfectly valid.

However, I feel that would be ignoring the fact that all of the manufacturers have reached a saturation point in terms of what you can really do with a smartphone outside of a continual hardware churn and revving the OS to current standards.

To give the guy credit, Pogue even thinks that Cupertino may be lagging in the innovation front as well. "Next time, it may be Apple’s turn to try harder" he concludes at the end of his S4 review, inferring that the next iPhone may not be a huge improvement over what exists today.

Rumors have circulated that the next device may be called the iPhone 5S, signalling the possibility of another evolutionary, but not revolutionary offering from Apple, not unlike the iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S transition in 2011.

The bottom line is that the buying public has certain basic expectations of what needs to be in smartphones, and that water mark is already pretty high, and may have been reached as much as two years ago.

So that we aren't treating the mainstream reviews as those that are anomalous, Mossberg and Pogue's S4 viewpoints and commentaries are consistent with reviews that have been published on numerous technology reporting sites and enthusiast blogs, ZDNet included. 

The smartphone device category is well-defined even within the sub-classifications such as phablets. You expect performance to be snappy regardless of how many cores are on the SoC that the phone uses, you expect the latest OS build.

You expect the rear-facing camera to take high-quality stills and video, you expect a front-facing HD camera for doing video chat, and you expect the device to have a high-resolution screen regardless of size that produces sharp, crisp video and has excellent color saturation and luminosity. And you expect the phone to be 4G LTE capable.

That's basic expectations, from any OEM, on any platform. 

The primary reason why people upgrade smartphones in the United States is they are on a 2-year cadence of re-upping contracts and wish to continue participating in a subsidized upgrade. Maybe their old device is acting flaky, maybe it's luster is lost on the end-user, or perhaps, as in many cases, the OS isn't updated to the latest version with the latest features.

But really, what was wrong with last year's Android smartphone? And for that matter, what was wrong with last year's iPhone? Or the one the year before that? 

And before you go there, yes, Windows Phone 8 is an interesting, different way of expressing the smartphone concept. I think Windows Phone is a great platform. I love my Nokia 920. But honestly, I know plenty of people that use Windows Phone 7 devices of various OEM and carrier origin and are perfectly happy running Windows Phone 7.5 on them.

If you're in contract, why upgrade to something newer unless you absolutely need an app that only runs on Windows Phone 8?

I have a BlackBerry 10 device for testing purposes as well, and there are some neat things that it does in order to differentiate, but groundbreaking? Nah. The real-time OS is cool, I'll give you that, although I question the actual consumer value. The hardware is at best, cutting edge as of two years ago.

One could argue, however, that Android 4.2 isn't a huge improvement over Android 4.1 or Android 4.0. Sure, there were performance tweaks, and a lot of architectual improvements in the underpinnings that developers would care about. But end-users? Not so much.

Maybe ZDNet's vocal maxi-zoom-dweebie peanut gallery cares about such distinctions, but your average consumer? They probably can't tell the diffference between any of these versions at a fundamental level.

One could also argue that iOS 6 isn't a huge improvement over iOS 5 either, but at least Apple has a pretty good track record even keeping 3 year old devices up to date, for the most part.

The smartphone industry needs to come to the conclusion that MOTSS (More of the Same Stuff) no longer cuts it. Neither does the never-ending pursuit of thinner and lighter and throwing more testosterone at the SoCs and onboard memory and GPUs either. We want innovation. We expect innovation.

Otherwise, why not turn in the smartphone in for an upgrade when the carrier eventually offers it for free, or when it finally dies out of contract and the carrier insurance plan refuses to replace it with a refurb? Why pay more than the bare minimum, if virtually every smartphone on the market meets basic expectations? 

Has smartphone innovation hit an evolutionary wall? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

In decades past, they had called it spring. But at 95+ degrees outside of Eva Konsumer's tiny studio apartment in downtown Miami, it sure felt like summer. In fact, Eva could not recall during her 25-year-old life when it wasn't blazing hot in April in Miami.

Unless there was a compelling reason to do so, these days, it was best to stay indoors where the concrete block construction and the industrial air conditioning systems could regulate temperature to a much more hospitable level. And down in South Florida, with the heavy sun, the UV alone from the hole in the Earth's ozone layer could cook you. Skin cancer city.

Like many of the new, ultra-dense apartment buildings in Miami, Eva's small studio had no windows, but she could see everything going on outside if she wanted,in completely polarized, sun-filtered ultradef crispness.

Of course, for a measly $8,000 a month, especially as a grad student studying environmental law at the University of Miami, you couldn't expect an apartment that was right on the beach. But it's not like anyone really cared about having an ocean view anymore because you could have an outside view of anything you wanted.

Hong Kong Harbor or New York City's Times Square at night. Tokyo's Roppongi district. Cairo. The International Moonbase at Tycho. Or the view outside the colony dome at Curiosity Station on Mars.

Like many young residents of Miami, Eva chose to live in a sparsely furnished flat. Its four walls and all of its cabinets were painted absolute "augwhite", with no hangings of any sort to adorn them. Lighting was an array of cool white dimmable OLEDs, integrated into the ceiling and corners.

She had her roll out bed/couch, her coffee table, her comfy chairs and stools for the breakfast bar in the kitchenette. And that was more than enough for any single girl going to school. More than enough for anyone, really.

She preferred to do most of her work on the comfy chair, unless it was one of those few times a month she had to drag herself to campus and actually meet her professors and fellow students for planned teaming events.

The University of Miami was a bit traditional when it came to their 80/20 telecommuting rules. Her best friend telepresences from Miami to MIT, and they don't have such policies.

Uncle Josef and Aunt Mindy felt all of this was a bit odd when they came to visit from New Jersey last month. They didn't understand the all-white, decor-free apartment. They didn't understand why she only went out to see her friends.

They even offered to give her some of Eva's grandmother's paintings to "lighten the place up", but what would she do with them? She could just simply have the Augplant display them anytime she felt like it since they were imaged in 32K so long ago.

She loved Uncle Josef and Aunt Mindy, even with their old-fashioned notions of how to live. They absolutely resisted getting Augplants when they became commercially avaliable about 10 years ago, instead choosing to stick with those antiquated modular tablet and smartphone systems, which few folks outside of senior citizens or children under the age of 13 use anymore.

And those huge 100-inch IGZO screens that hung on their walls in their home in New Jersey. The old cloud ThinTerms with flat panel monitors on... Desks. My God, what a waste of energy. How ungreen. How unproductive.

Of course, even if they wanted an Augplant or an AR monacle (what was that once called, Google Glass? The kind she saw in old vids?), they both would need to get corrective eye surgery as well to fix their macular degeneration, and sharpen or even replace their lenses.

Most old folks didn't do that. Not unless you were like, I dunno, someone like Mark Zuckerberg. Who had his done a while ago.

Eva's parents chose to elminate eyesight problems, among a number of other issues, from her genome before she was born. On her 13th birthday, her mom brought her to the local Gammazoft Augmentation Implantology clinic.

Eva remembered being scared of the operation, but her mom assured her everything would be ok, and that she needed this in order "to have an advantage". They gave her a general anesthetic and she went to sleep.

It was a long time ago, but she remembered waking up an hour or so later in a recovery bed. The nurse was sitting down on a chair looking over her. She had an itchy pain on the back of her head, and there was some hair missing when she felt back there. 

Why remember though? She could see it as if it had just happened moments ago.

"Personal Lifelog, playback, primary wall display. Time index zero plus five seconds."

"Playback: September 15, 2022. Logstart."

The large "window" in her apartment that was showing a live 34th-floor view of downtown Miami faded into a video playback of the moment she first started lifelogging. The day she got her augplant. 

The video began with the nice Cuban nurse. She was pudgier than she remembered. Butch, even. What was her name?

"Don't worry sweetie, it will grow back. The cut will heal quickly; we used a cauterizing laser and a skin growth accelerant to seal it. Now, I want you to quietly say the word 'display'." 

"Display."

"Gammazoft Augplant OS 9.3.2. Lifelogging enabled," is what Eva heard. Inside her head.

Then the world came to life. Everything had a label. From here on, there were answers to every question. 

She looked up at the nurse. Above her head were all sorts of statistical details. Elizabeth Hernandez, RN, age 36, graduate of the NOVA University of South Florida Nursing School with a specialization in Augmented Reality Implantology. 500 level 1 SocMed connections, Lifebook account @augnurselizzyh. Wife Janet Hernandez, age 34, Miami-Dade County director of product marketing at Gammazoft.

The list scrolled on and on. A dizzying array of information, just from one person.

There was also an icon for "Lifelog Request" on her chest. Eva pointed to thin air and touched the icon. The nurse smiled.

"Oh no, hija, there's a lot of patient confidental material in that. I can't even show Janet those things. But if you'd like, I can show you how we did your procedure. My life is boring anyway. There's so many good ones you can follow. Just ask her. Do you like her default name? Auggy?"

"Yes, I think."

"Well, you can change it anytime you like. She can tell you and show you all sorts of things, too. Do you see that wall over there?"

"Umm, yeah, it's white."

"Well, it doesn't have to stay that way. Reach out and touch it."

An interface appeared in thin air. It was kind of like the one she had on her tablet, but it had many more options than just email, social networking, and apps. And it was pre-configured with her cloud profile. She could see her friends in there. 

"Where's mom?" Eva said.

"She's in the waiting room shopping. Or logwatching. Why don't you see? Say, logwatch livestream Susan Konsumer, alias mom."

Eva said the words. It was like magic.

"Logshare enabled, Konsumer, Susan G, Newalias Mom, livestream," is what she heard. Then she saw ... She was her mom.

She was now sitting on the couch with a large display floating in front of her. It was the Gammazoft product catalog, a list of groceries. She could see her mother's hands flipping through the meat section. And then she started talking in her head.

"I'm shopping, honey. But see, you can get to me anytime you want. Your dad wants steak this weekend, so we'll have to go pick up the food at the depot tonight instead of Prime delivery."

"Wait, you said anytime? What about when you and dad are ... Ew! Gross!"

Susan laughed. Eva could almost sense her turning red. If she looked at the vital signs widget, she would have probably noticed a momentary jump in galvanic skin response and blood pressure.

"I have logshare set to 'private' for that, silly. Only your dad can see it."

"Oh. But where does it all go?"

"The family Gammazoft logstore account. We have 300 petabytes per year, and we currently pay for 10 year extended vaulting."

"So do I share with you, then?"

"I've already asked the nurse for your log to be shared with me and dad. If you want to share with your older brother and sister, that's up to you. But I have yours set for parental control with us until you are 18. What you do after you're an adult is your own business."

"So what about other people's logs?"

"If they've set them to public, or if they grant you access, you can review any kind you want. But your father and I are going to get an alert if the logcontent is explicit. You should probably only browse stuff that is age appropriate for you anyway. Like vids and your schoolwork.

And we're going to review your privacy settings until you understand how it works. Remember what happened with your sister's best friend? Everyone in her extended circles got to see what happened on that terrible date of hers. That guy was a complete creep. Tens of thousands of people saw the entire thing go down on Lifebook. Very embarrassing for her."

"Yeah, everyone in school was talking about that. So I can get Jody Bieber's lifelog?"

"Only chapter excerpts. He heavily edits it, and he'll make you pay for the extended material. And I'm going to get a bill for things like that, so I'm going to have to authorize your purchases. There's plenty of free lifelogs though, because they get monetized through Gammazoft's advertising network."

"Can I turn off the monetization? I see a lot of ads in front of you. What's this Erectile Enhancement-on-Demand implant it says that dad should get? And it says his testosterone levels are too low. What is that, anyway?"

Susan sighed. Kids.

"There's specific services we've subscribed to in order to reduce monetization exposure, but eventually, you'll tune out a lot of the ads. It keeps costs down to have them. When I'm driving, the augplant handles information presentation to reduce distraction. When you get your learner's permit, you'll have this as well."

"So, the logs... You have access to mine."

"Yes, for your protection. I want to make sure you're not getting into trouble."

"What about when I'm in the bathroom?"

"I'll know when you're in there and I won't look, obviously. Who wants to see that?"

"Besides you and dad ... and whoever else I give it to ... who else can see my logs?"

"Law enforcement, and the government if they feel it is warranted. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) expansion act of 2016 extended its access to lifelogs. You'll learn those things when you get moved to a class with other augplanted children soon...

"And of course, Gammazoft systems perform analytics on your logs and other metadata to give you trend analysis, which, of course, is for your benefit. Your apps and services will have the ability to interact with those reports. It's a great tool to go over what you might not remember, or not even notice on a day-to-day basis. Auggy will tell you many things that you should know."

"This is a lot of stuff, mom."

"I know sweetie. But you'll be happier. You don't want to be like the notaugs. Look how difficult life is for them." 

"Can we go home now, mom? I'm tired."

"You can always go home, now that you're an aug, sweetie."

"Personal lifelog, halt playback."

These folks are among those who are willing to pay the early adoption fee of $1,500 and become one of the select few to wear, test, and develop software for the product.

There's a not-so-flattering descriptor that has already been applied to this group of digital cognoscenti who have been seen recently at industry conferences and public venues wearing the device: Glassholes.

It could certainly be argued that whenever a new consumer technology enters society, those who are quick to adopt it are typically ridiculed by the have-nots. Eventually, many of these technologies become commonplace and are more accepted by the mainstream, particularly when they become more affordable.

This has pretty much always been the case, starting with the radio pager, then the cellular phone, text capable handsets, and then, of course, Bluetooth headsets, the smartphone and the tablet.

People who first used these things were once seen very much as elitist and not part of the mainstream, and they were considered disruptive.

To some extent, even with their popularity, they are still considered disruptive when used in various social contexts.

However, Glass is very different from all of these technologies. While it is, at the end of the day, a mobile technology platform just like a smartphone or a tablet, it differs in that it is an "always-on" technology that has one particular feature that the others do not — and that's the issue of lifelogging.

Lifelogging is fundamentally the same as having a smartphone or any small digital camera that can record and store many hours of video.

Virtually every smartphone on the market today has a built-in high-definition camera with enough onboard storage to record an entire day's worth of events, if someone wanted to use them that way and it had enough reserve battery power to do it.

But at least with these technologies, you know when they are being used. It's obvious when someone is using a smartphone or a tablet to take photographs or record video.

I'm not so sure I can live in a culture where everyone is lifelogging virtually all of the time.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you listen to Louis CK's diatribe on the subject.

With Glass, because the device is being worn and there's no indication of when it is being used, one has to assume that the wearer is recording everyone all of the time.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have serious issues with the notion that I could be recorded by everyone at any time. 

Look, I am aware that law enforcement and government agencies have us under surveillance, and it's not uncommon for people to be photographed and videoed hundreds of times per day, particularly if you live in a major city.

That I can accept, and it's a price that we have to pay for living in a modern society where there are people out to do us harm, and our government and law enforcement agencies need to protect us.

That's become extremely evident in recent days, as law enforcement officials in Boston sort out hundreds of hours of video, not just from stationary surveillance cameras, but from videos shot by onlookers at the marathon itself.

Sometimes, video recording at a mass scale has social benefits besides law enforcement.

Dashboard-mounted car cameras used to record footage of highway criminal activity, as well as police and government corruption in Russia, were used extensively by private citizens to video document a once-in-a-century meteor strike in Siberia in February of 2013.

Video recording can be a powerful tool, but it's also a major privacy intrusion. 

I'm not so sure I can live in a culture where everyone is lifelogging virtually all of the time. I have an idea of what one might look like, though.

In Robert J Sawyer's Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hominids, which is part of his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, he portrays a humanoid society on an alternate version of earth in which virtually no crime or any form of violence occurs because every person has an implant in their body that causes all of their life events to be recorded and uploaded to a centralized storage repository.

The novel was published in 2002, but today, we'd call that centralized storage repository the Cloud. 

There's a plot element in the novel that details what happens in those rare instances in which a murder takes place and a subject goes to trial. Suffice to say that, unlike our society, where private audio and video recordings have to be submitted as evidence and might not be admissable in court, this is not the case in the world in which Sawyer has envisioned.

In the world of Hominids, a person's life is judged upon the content of their lifelogging.

My concern is not so much that people will be caught commiting crimes. For those purposes, I believe privately recorded video and audio most definitely should be considered as evidence in a court of law.

It's the things that are not so much criminal, but which are said and done in close company that make me nervous about lifelogging tech.

There are things you only say and do with close friends in confindence, others which may be revealed in private business meetings, et cetera. We all know and have seen what happens when supposedly "private" or unauthorized recordings are made behind closed doors and then leaked to the general public, either intentionally or accidentally.

It can cost someone their career. It can destroy one's personal reputation. It will most certainly cause one strife with one's friends and family. And as we have most recently seen, it can also cost you a Presidential Election.

If these kinds of devices do become commonplace — and I have no doubt that they will — then there will have to be social rules and norms for their use.

Because they are a wearable tech, and will almost certainly be integrated into regular perscription eyeglass frames, there will have to be some kind of indication (such as a LED "on air" light, or something to that effect) that they are currently recording, and there needs to be "Antiglass" technology to prevent its use by people who do not wish to be part of someone else's lifelogging activities.

I see "Antiglass" as a personal shield of sorts, that emits a radio signal that disrupts the use of Glass within a certain distance unless the wearer is legitimately using the device for law enforcement purposes. "Antiglass" could be integrated into smartphones, smart watches, or even other lifelogging devices as well.

Wide-cast antiglass fields could be set up in establishments, such as private social clubs and places of business, which prohibit the use of lifelogging functions, just as cell phone signal jamming technology is already used (albeit illegally) in some places today.

Obviously, for this type of anti-lifelogging tech to work, there has to be an agreed upon API or programmatic trigger signals that cannot easily be defeated by hackers.

But if it cannot be made to work, or if the effectiveness of the tech cannot be guaranteed, then I forsee situations where people will be forced to remove and surrender their devices in order to prevent the possibility of recording, as well as a change in our culture to be much more careful about what one says, even in very intimate situations.

And that is an Orwellian chilling effect that I think could be very harmful to the development of our society as a whole.

This chilling effect was evident in decades past in East Germany while the country was in fear of the ever-watching eyes and ears of the Stasi, which had perhaps the largest informant and surveillance network of any nation per capita in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, the USSR included. 

For a current take on Orwellian dystopia, look no further than modern-day North Korea, where all of that country's citizens are frightened of being observed by the state, regardless of whether or not the hermit kingdom actually has the resources to do it or not.

Except that it's not the State you would need to be fearful of with technologies like Glass.

With lifelogging, Big Brother could be a recording made by your own best friend when you both went out for drinks, and who then decides to share an off-color joke you made that evening around the office.

Or one from your spouse who decides to upload candid highlights from a family event to Facebook or YouTube without consulting you first.

Will Glasshole culture create a chilling effect on society? Talk back and let me know.

According to a report recently released by Gartner, sales of PCs in the first quarter of 2013, regardless of manufacturer and operating system platform, are the worst since an all-time low in the second quarter of 2009.

IDC presented similar results in another study that indicates sales are down 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.

This is not just bad news, it's awful news for no matter who you are, whether you produce PC software and operating systems, or PCs and PC components themselves.

It also doesn't make a difference whether you're headquartered in Redmond, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Austin, or Morrisville, North Carolina for that matter. Or Hong Kong.

I cannot say that I am particularly surprised about this, because this is a topic that I have been writing about for a while. 

A year ago, I participated in a Great Debate with ZDNet's Zack Whittaker on whether or not PC OEMs would survive in an environment dominated by smartphones and tablets.

I took the "No" side of the argument, and summarized my thoughts in an article aptly named "Post-PC era means mass extinction for personal computer OEMs".

I won that debate, by the way. For the second time in a row.

So the decline has been happening for at least two years, if not a bit more. We've seen the warning signs of a climate change, now we're seeing clear signs of the beginning of an extinction event.

Therefore, we can't blame this rightly or wrongly on the wholesale rejection of a single OS release by end users due to substantial UX changes as much as some people would like one to believe, because the downward trend has been with us for quite some time.  

The real reason why the PC era is coming to an end is the notion of "Good Enough" computing. 

Tablets and low-power convertibles and inexpensive ultrabooks provide an experience that yields sufficient functionality that is not as rich as the traditional PC experience, whether it is overall processing power or app complexity, but they are less expensive, more battery efficient and much easier to lug around.

I learned this lesson for myself personally when I went to a trade conference this week in Las Vegas and only brought a Microsoft Surface RT and two of my smartphones with me, an iPhone 5 and a Nokia 920. I was away from my home office with my full-blown PC laptop running Windows 8, and yet I was still able to get all of my work done.

I probably could have left my iPhone home entirely, but it was the one device that I own with an unlimited data plan for watching Netflix movies in my hotel room, and I chain-charged the phones so that one was always on duty. 

All of my important remote/mobile work was accomplished with a $500 tablet with a magnetic detachable keyboard and a smartphone.

Now, price and weight is only part of the equation. Yes, people really like the fact that these things are incredibly light, and they can get eight to ten hours of battery life, and you can still do a lot of things with them that PCs can do.

But to make these Post-PC devices do their magic, and to make the transition without being disruptive to the traditional business workflows and workloads that we currently enjoy, you need something significant to offload the functionality of complex applications that run on PCs today.

That significant thing is the Cloud, and I think we can also say with a high degree of confidence that this is going to be the workhorse of the personal computing experience going forward. Today, the Cloud is highly misunderstood and it is also in many cases vilified and feared.

But it is also what is going to facilitate a seamless transition to an industry dominated by Post-PC devices and allow our PC software ecosystem to evolve into a healthy end-state.

Without sophisticated Cloud-based applications, whether they are exposed by web services and accessed by simple applications running on iOS, Android or the Windows RT API, or as fully-hosted desktop apps running virtually in the datacenter via subscription or by using existing enterprise licensing models, Post-PC systems as we understand them in their roles as used in business and the enterprise will not work. 

So while Post-PC devices are cannibalizing their forebears for their lower price points, their superior battery life and lighter load, they are entirely dependent on the fundamental systems architecture, applications and business logic that were pioneered before them on PCs and continue to be essential today.

And as with any extinction event, the process does not happen overnight and there are those species that will continue to dominate regardless of the overall health of the ecosystem. The use of PCs is indeed declining, but certain form factors are succeeding even within that declining enviornment.

I recently ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch as my new work PC. You would think that with all this doom and gloom surrounding PC sales, I could get it delivered to my home office by FedEx or UPS in a week. Not so.

Lenovo might as well re-name the X1 Carbon Touch the X1 Unobtanium, because that's practically what it is. This high-end, touchscreen Windows 8 Ultrabook has over a one month lead time from order until delivery. I'll be lucky to receive mine sometime in June.

And as I understand, this is par for the course for other manufacturers with similar lightweight, convertible touchscreen devices. I've also been told by reliable sources that during the abysmal holiday season of 2012, big box stores didn't order enough of these systems and they sold out, whereas the old-school, heavier laptops and desktop systems didn't move and resulted in a surplus of these machines in the channel.

Why are these types of PCs thriving when others are not? Because they are adapting to their environment. The PC is changing its form factor to become more like its Post-PC counterparts. The dinosaurs are becoming birds. 

Some of this has to do with whether or not the OEM is especially agile and can mimic the attributes of their Post-PC manufacturing peers. Lenovo is a highly-focused Chinese company and understands how to leverage the Asian supply chain to its best advantage.

To quote my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott, "To a large extent, the secret of their success in the US is going up against the totally hapless HP and distracted Dell. So they maintain absolute sales in a shrinking market and actually gain share."

And like its Post-PC rival Samsung, Lenovo is also reportedly making investments in semiconductor technology so it can become more self-sufficient.

It should also be no surprise that Samsung is also doing well and actually growing its own PC business, which like Lenovo, are more of the extremely lightweight, Ultrabook style of machines that are targeted almost exclusively to business and the enterprise.

These birds for the most part aren't playing in the same consumer muck that their Cretaceous Tyrannosaurian and Certotopsian colleagues are. Which is why they are actually thriving in a chilling environment. 

The Mesozoic era of the PC had a good run. Are we now about to cede that to the Post-PC Cenozoic, dominated by birds that fly in the Clouds? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

It was originally anticipated that Facebook was going to announce an Android phone of its own design or a device partnership. But what the company really wants to do is make all Android phones a Facebook phone.

This is certainly an ambitious plan for The Social Network. Android is the most popular mobile operating system, and it makes sense for the company to try to grab as much land and end-user mindshare for itself using existing devices as much as possible.

While it may not have been Facebook's actual intention, Home for Android is really just a fragmentation grenade. 

The Android operating system has been plagued with fragmentation ever since the 2.x branch of the mobile OS was released on multiple carrier devices.

The transition from 2.0 "Eclair" to 2.x  "Froyo", to 3.x Honeycomb" and 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich", and most recently, both iterations of 4.x "Jelly Bean", as well as all patch iterations and dot versions in between, has left a scattered landscape of devices among many carriers and OEMs in various states of OS upgrade version malaise.

This has created problems for Android developers when coding applications, and when they test against different versions of the OS and different target devices.

The introduction of multiple versions of Amazon's Kindle Fire, as well as the Android Dalvik 2.3.3 port running in BlackBerry OS 10 has further complicated this situation by creating additional "Forks" of the Android OS, which have their own unique application issues that developers need to address.

Taken at face value, Facebook Home is not a fork of Android. In many ways it is no different from the overlays that Motorola has used in their Motoblur Android phones, that Samsung has done with their customized TouchWiz Nature UX on the Galaxy S phones, and even what Amazon has done with their own custom UX overlay on top of standard Android.

There are dozens of such 3rd-party overlays or launchers, which you can purchase from the Google Play store today, that end-users can use to customize their device, and give it a completely different look and feel from stock Android. So in that same sense, Facebook Home is harmless.

But I don't expect Facebook Home to stay harmless for very long. A fragmentation grenade is also harmless as long as the arming pin stays put. Pull it out, different story.

To get value out of Facebook Home, the company is almost certainly going to want to monetize it, and that means processing payments for in-app purchases outside of Google Play or introducing their own app store.

If that happens, Google will throw Facebook Home off the Play Store as either one of those actions will violate the terms of their Developer Distribution Agreement.

Additionally, should Facebook choose to monetize Home for Android with advertisements, there are any number of land mines the company can step on under Google's Developer Program Policy that will get them thrown off Google Play as well. 

If Facebook Home for Android gets thrown off Google Play — a fate which I believe to be inevitable — then Facebook will do precisely what Amazon does with their own Appstore for Android today, which is to allow end-users to sideload it.

I believe it is highly unlikely that Google will prohibit sideloading of all apps. But Google's OEM partners, particularly Samsung, who is evolving on a divergent path from vanilla Android to begin with by having all of their own value-added apps that replace core functionality in the Google version, will not want Facebook to override the default user experience. 

As a result of this, I expect Samsung at some point in the future to rely entirely on its own app store for Android, and will diverge from Google's OS and become a legitimate fork. We might even see Samsung use Android Dalvik for application compatability in Tizen and become a hybrid OS, like BlackBerry 10.

This is how the road to fragmentation hell is paved.

Amazon will also almost certainly go beyond overlays and become a legitimate fork with its products because it's obvious that they have airs for the smartphone market as well, now that they have hired former Windows Phone executive Charlie Kindel.

Samsung and Amazon will almost certainly introduce new libraries and new APIs in order for developers to take advantage of the distinct features of their respective Androids. And Facebook Home, as it evolves, will also extend its tendrils into the OS in the very same way.

This is how the road to fragmentation hell is paved.

LG will not want to anger Google, and will not preload or enter any sort of partnership with Facebook or a wireless carrier that wants it.

Because it is the least influential of the Android OEMs and will want to maintain its position as the premier Nexus handset OEM, LG may also enact policies on its software that prevent Facebook Home from being installed.

In fact, it would not surprise me for Google to regard Facebook Home as malware and prevent it from being sideloaded on all Nexus-branded products as well.

And if Google and Samsung both end up in a full-out war with Facebook over APIs and OS extensions and such, you can expect that Facebook will retaliate by turning off access or restricting the way its Graph API can be used by non-Facebook mobile software. We saw these API restrictions happen with 3rd-party Twitter clients; for Facebook to do this as well sometime in the future is not a huge stretch of the imagination.

This leaves us with the other fish, such as HTC, ZTE, Lenovo, and Huawei.

HTC, which is undergoing tremendous financial stress at the moment, will probably do anything to distinguish itself and pull away from the precipice, so carrier preloads of Facebook Home, such as on the recently anncounced AT&T "HTC First" device, are going to be its standard operating practice going forward.

It would also not surprise me to see Facebook take a future stake in the beleagurered smartphone maker in order to preseve a place for their software on a flagship device, much like Google now does with LG on the Nexus 4 and Asus on the Nexus 7 tablet.

ZTE, Lenovo, and Huawei service primarily a domentic market in China, and will run their own weird domestic builds of Android with state-approved social networking software to keep the Chinese government happy. It's unlikely Facebook Home will see much traction there at all.

This leaves us with no less than four, five, or six distinct forks of Android. Google as represented on Nexuses or Google Experience devices, Amazon, Samsung, HTC/Facebook, and whatever weird beast ends up running for domestic Chinese use. And BlackBerry 10's Dalvik implementation.

The future of the Android developer ecosystem is fiefdoms controlled by powerful warlords.

If you thought Android was fragmented now, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

Is Facebook Home for Android a potential fragmentation grenade for the popular mobile OS? Talk back and let me know.

The People's Republic of China represents the largest contract manufacturer of consumer electronics as well as business and enterprise computer equipment in the world.

Many of you are familiar with Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, also known as Foxconn. In its 13 factories located in nine Chinese cities, the manufacturing giant performs final assembly of Apple's iPhone and iPad, not to mention a huge pipeline of products from many other OEMs, including IBM and HP, as well as game consoles made by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

There are many other clients that Foxconn has that are too numerous to mention.

And Foxconn is just one manufacturer based in China. There are quite a few significant others, including TSMC, a Taiwanese firm that is the largest independent manufacturer of computer chips in the world.

TSMC has foundries in Taiwan, China, and Singapore and specializes in the system-on-a-chip semiconductors (SoC) that go into smartphone handsets and many kinds of tablets, and is slated to become the primary manufacturer of A-series SoCs that are used in Apple's iOS devices.

GlobalFoundries, in Singapore, is another prominent semiconductor firm that has AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and STMicroelectronics as major customers.

And there are also those firms that specialize in manufacturing flash memory that is used in SSDs and mobile devices, DRAM, as well as controller ASICs of all sorts used in every consumer and business application imaginable.

Taken as a whole, the three Chinese-speaking nations are a crucial contract manufacturing triad of many, many technology products that are used throughout the world. But it's only part of the story.

Right next door to China is Korea. North Korea, the hermit kingdom, has no technology value whatsoever. But South Korea is home to Samsung, a technology conglomerate that in and of itself has 10 times the GDP of South Korea's neighbor in the north.

Samsung not only produces and brands its own products, like the Galaxy smartphones and tablets, but it is also the largest SoC foundry in the entire world.

In addition to its own SoC line, the Exynos, Samsung also makes chips for Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, which are used in many other smartphones and tablets. And it is also the current volume manufacturer of the A-Series chips used in the Apple iOS products. Among others.

Samsung is also the world's largest producer of DRAM and Flash, as well as the largest manufacturer of LCD displays of all sizes. And a huge manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries.

And we're just talking about Samsung here. There are other gigantic technology companies in South Korea, such as LG and the SK Group, which are important participants in the overall semiconductor supply chain.

If there were to be any disruption in the pace of manufacturing in either China or South Korea, or, in a nightmare scenario, both countries, or extend to nations of influence such as Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the technology industry as we know it would effectively come to a screeching halt.

What could cause such a thing?

I am not an economist. I am not a political scientist. I am not a sociologist. But I am a technologist who from time to time dabbles in futurism. I like to ponder, on occasion, what technology may exist 10 or 20 years from now, and how society and our economy may be impacted as a whole.

These are thought exercises that for the most part I find entertaining, and it's good fodder for writing material.

I normally do not think about the near future and what could happen under certain geopolitical and socioeconomic scenarios and what it means for our industry, because there's too much immediate randomness in our world. But recent events in Asia have gotten me thinking, and what I have been thinking about disturbs me greatly.

There's been a lot of saber rattling in North Korea lately. Most political analysts write this off as crazy blusters of a young leader looking to cement his position and appearance of strength with old-guard military installed under his father's reign, and may have no real intention whatsoever of causing a conflict.

There are certainly risks that Kim Jong-Un may try to push the boundaries of what is acceptable and go too far, such as a small demonstration of military capability by attacking a small South Korean island with artillery fire, or testing more missiles that could indicate nuclear delivery capability.

That would prompt a military retaliation by South Korea and the United States, and could escalate into an all-out conflict.

In such a conflict, there is no question that South Korea's technology centers will be targets.

Granted, the chance of this happening spontaneously in the next few months is probably slim. China, behind the scenes, is almost certainly telling Kim Jong-Un there's only so much mishegas it will tolerate before it severely curtails or cuts off the vital aid and assistance the country needs from a military and economic standpoint.

Without Chinese assistance, North Korea starves to death.

But there's a much bigger problem that could result in a snowball effect, which could force such a conflict.

Over the last few weeks, China has been trying to contain the spread of a strain of avian flu virus, H7N9. It has now been confirmed that two men in Shanghai have recently died from this pathogen, and hospitals in Beijing are stocking up on essentials to contain a full-on pandemic. As I write this, more and more cases are being reported.

Every year, the world holds its breath to see if the next avian flu strain originating in China is capable of jumping to other species through the food chain and affecting the general population through human-to-human transmission. Sixteen thousand pigs have been found dead in a river near Shanghai, and medical authorities there are attempting to determine whether there is a link with H7N9.

This particular outbreak could end up being contained very quickly, there may be no link whatsoever to the food chain in China, and there is no evidence as of yet that people can transmit this strain to each other. But someday, perhaps in the next few years, we could run out of luck, and China could end up in a full-blown pandemic.

In a pandemic situation, China would want to restrict travel between cities, and would impose martial law. Logistically, it would make the manufacturing of electronics difficult, and if a large population of skilled workers were to become ill, it could cause the Chinese supply chain to shut down entirely.

Under this scenario, China would be busy with dealing with any number of internal problems, and Foxconn and other major contract manufacturers could be closed down for months, perhaps as long as a year. This alone would wreak havoc with the technology industry on a number of levels.

But we're just talking about turning the factory off switch in China itself. Any reasonable outbreak would take time to determine all of the vectors, and because of the trade and commerce and heavy transportation of goods, services, and travellers between China, South Korea, Japan, and other countries in Asia, it is extremely likely that such a pandemic would find itself in those countries as well.

And if South Korea gets sick, then we've really got problems.

Ironically, North Korea's isolation from the rest of the world actually puts it at something of an advantage in terms of being shielded from a pandemic situation in Asia.

But if China is occupied by dealing with a pandemic, and Korea also potentially has to deal with a pandemic, and North Korea's economic support from China and other nations becomes disrupted in any way, there's a problem.

With his country under extreme economic duress, Kim Jong-Un and his generals might see a target of opportunity, and then the possibility of that nation going to war with its neighbor to the South increases significantly.

The global economic consequences of such a "perfect storm" in Asia like the kind I describe are massive and would have far-ranging implications on many industries and economies, not just the tech sector. Obviously, no electronics and technology of any kind would be able to be produced for a long period of time, and would cause the channel inventory of all kinds of products to run dry.

People won't be wondering when they can get the next iPad, iPhone, or Galaxy product. Or even thinking about such concepts as fanboyism. They'll be thinking about when they can get technology products, period.

The price of existing products in the channel will skyrocket. Replacement parts for all sorts of things will become scarce. Large secondary markets for used products will open up. The wireless industry will almost certainly have to freeze sales on new phones. PCs of any kind, old stock or new stock, running any flavor of OS, will be in huge demand.

And the companies that have server and datacenter equipment in abundance, like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Oracle, Fujitsu, and Cisco will be stockpiling these for their own use as well as for the US and EU governments.

In the absence of being able to buy new equipment and keep datacenters running, many enterprises might look to cloud services providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and hosted offerings by large services firms like IBM GTS and HP EDS that can either acquire such equipment or already own it.

But I suspect that long before that, the US and EU governments will enact controls and emergency legislation that will set quotas on what equipment can be bought and sold, and how these large corporations will control technology resources.

Almost certainly, technology rivals that would normally not want to sit in the same room with each other and that engage in open trash talk in today's environment would be forced to cooperate.

I won't even get to what happens if we can't keep a pandemic from spreading to this country. That's an article for someone else, and a scenario that frightens me too much to even contemplate the consequences.

Would a pandemic in China create a "perfect storm" for disrupting the global technology industry? Talk back and let me know.

While I own a lot more technology than the average person, I don't have a powerful PC gaming rig, nor do I even own a gaming console.

Much of my entertainment comes from reading, and watching movies and TV, not to mention my passion for cooking and wine, among other things. I have a really busy lifestyle, between working in the technology sector and writing about the tech industry. So I tend to choose diversions that have the least technology involved as possible. 

This is not to say I don't have a fine appreciation for what game developers as well as what computer modellers do. In fact, you could say that computer generated imagery is something of a family business.

My brother, Brandon, is a CGI modeler that has worked extensively in the entertainment and film industry, so I know exactly what kind of technology is used to create the sophisticated creatures, effects and scenery.

It's a labor-intensive process, requiring some very expensive software and hardware, not to mention rendering infrastructure that requires a level of parallelization rivalling the levels of supercomputers.

Heck, if you're WETA, which produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recently The Hobbit, you really do have supercomputers in order to produce these films.

Still, as impressive as these movies and animations are, computer-generated imagery for the most part, as least as it is applied in game design and filmmaking, still looks computer-generated.

It's also easy for us to accept something like a Dragon or an Orc or some alien creature as an "actor" in a film, because it's not something we have a natural frame of reference with. 

Realistic depictions of human beings, however, have always been the holy grail of CGI. To date, nobody has really been able to create CGI that fools human beings into believing that they are looking at another real human being and not something that is rendered and appears completely artificial.

Part of this has to do with tradeoffs in sheer computer horsepower and the time it takes to render and model the "actor".

You could model a very realistic human being in CGI, using hundreds of thousands of sampled textures and millions of colors, model the precise lighting and level of complexity in sheer mind-boggingly high polygon count that makes us look "real", but we'd be talking about a truly massive level of effort and use of computer resources that would be needed to pull this off. 

Historically, it just hasn't been worth trying to do in a feature-length film, because the resources, be it rendering time or the human labor needed to achieve this would be astronomically expensive.

And at best, what you would have is a frame-by-frame rendered movie. You could never generate these kinds of images in real-time, in something like a computer game or a simulation. And it would take many years to produce. It just wasn't feasible.

Until now.

At last week's 2013 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, game developer Activision showed a preview of the kind of real-time generated human character technology we might find avaliable on commodity computer hardware within the next five years. 

And when I mean commodity, I'm talking about cheap, entry-level PCs and game consoles. Perhaps even the next generation of tablets and smartphones. Not the elite "gamer" PCs and CGI production workstations that cost thousands of dollars.

At GDC Activision showed demos like this using two year old laptops with very entry-level GPU technology. 

Activision's demo is eerie. Creepy even. Yes, you can still tell that this is computer-generated, and there are more than enough flaws in the rendering that the suspension of disbelief goes away. There's no facial hair, and it's only a single disembodied head, and detail is lost in certain areas, particularly around the mouth.

But this is much more sophisticated, and far more realistic than anything that we have seen in a computer game before.

The implications are far-reaching, and concern me greatly.

Imagine that within ten years time, the ability to visualize highly-realistic, computer-generated actors in real-time can be accomplished not only by using commodity consumer tablet and gaming hardware, but can also be produced by anyone that can hire a modest-sized team of computer animators and can afford a million dollars (or less) worth of server rendering and workstation budget.

TV and movie studios could produce films that bring beloved and long-dead actors back from the grave. 

But this also means that entities willing to do harm to someone's personal reputation, or even engage in acts of CGI terrorism could, with enough biometric data and texture sampling (in the form of high-resolution photographs and enough audio to produce convincing "voice fonts") could make well-known public figures appear to do and say things that they did not actually do, in videos posted on the Internet and on live televison.

Once the model of the actor was created, the time to produce videos that could respond to current events would be fairly swift.

Think about what North Korea or Iran could do with this. Or China. Or what certain interest groups in our own country could do. Or corporations. Or single individuals with private agendas.

Are we on the verge of being able to produce highly-realistic depictions of human beings using real-time computer-generated imagery? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

You'll never move to it because you have too much personal data to move, you'll never trust it due to security concerns, and it will never work for you because you're still using 56K dialup or worse, IP over Avian Carrier protocol or smoke signalling.

Yeah, whatever. You're still going to be assimilated. Have a nice day. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

Despite all this thrashing about there is a group of people who don't have these kinds of concerns, and have been eagerly joining the Cloud Continuum faster than any other demographic. 

I'm talking about minority groups. Especially Hispanics and Latinos. Tiene mucho amor por el Cloud.

While all of you have been doing your bitching and complaining about the Cloud, this group of people, who have traditionally been on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide, are now reaching parity with the privileged. 

How do I define privileged? Oh, I dunno. You can probably afford to own a PC and pay for basic residential broadband. And you're probably White.

A new study, released in March 2013 by the Pew Hispanic Research Center has determined that in a short three years, the gap between Whites and Hispanic use of of the Internet in the United States has closed by half.

Three years ago only 64 percent of Hispanics used the Internet as opposed to 72 percent of African Americans and 80 percent of Whites.

In 2012, Hispanics matched African Americans in usage at 78 percent, while Whites slightly increased to 87 percent. 

Latinos primarily depend on their mobile devices, rather than desktop and laptop computers when accessing the Internet. 76 percent, versus 60 percent of White Americans.

As we dig even further into the study's data, we learn that nearly half of Latino adults live in Cellphone-only households, and that smartphone adoption can be correlated with age. More specifically those Latinos between ages of 18 to 29 are much more likely to own a smartphone than those ages 65 and older.

So it's the younger generation of Latinos that is really adopting smartphone technology. 

Cloud adoption has been linked to the use of Mobile devices, particulary in BYOD scenarios. There's no question about that. As the younger generation of Latinos attain higher levels of education, and as they enter the workforce, they will gain more affluence and buy things like tablets.

And with that entering of the workforce, they will bring their preferences of using Cloud services such as email and social networking, among other types of services they are adopting, including mobile apps and also subscriber services.

But the bottom line is, you don't need to own a PC and have residential broadband to reach information parity with the rest of the world anymore.

Another interesting factoid: Latinos using services like Facebook and Twitter from their mobile devices are primarily doing it in English. So if anything their devices are improving their integration into mainstream American society.

So maybe it's not the Cloud so much that scares the hell out of some folks, but that large groups of people who were previously left behind and out of sight and out of mind in the digital divide will now have access to many if not all of the same online resources as everyone else, with cheap smartphones and tablets, cheap carrier data plans and ubiquitous Wi-Fi in public locations.

Perhaps you don't hate the Cloud so much that you hate the idea that minorities are going to ruin your digital neighborhood. 

Cheap access to technology that was previously prohibitively expensive to large groups of people has always proven to level the playing field between the advantaged and disadvantaged.

Cloud, combined with ongoing industry disruption that has been caused by the increased popularity of low-cost mobile devices like smartphones and tablets will continue this trend, well into the future.

And some of you may not like this. But I for one embrace my Latino brothers and sisters in the Cloud Continuum.

Vive El Cloud! Talk Back and Let Me Know.

While I applaud the sheer numbers of apps that their developers have been able to seed the store with in such a short period of time for the Z10's US carrier launch, BlackBerry, untill very recently, has not been forthcoming as to what kind of apps they were.

On Tuesday, it was confirmed that approximately 20 percent of the applications in the BlackBerry 10 App world were in fact, re-packaged Android apps.

Back in Q1 2011, RIM had finally confirmed what had been rumored for months: That its then-new PlayBook tablet, which runs on the same fundamental QNX operating system that BlackBerry 10 uses, would be able to run Android applications in addition to Adobe Air, HTML5, and native C/C++ QNX apps.

A "Better Android than Android", if you may. 

The more I wrap my head around the whole thing, the more I begin to feel like I've seen this happen before.

In fact, it was 20 years ago. The vendor who last tried to do this was ... IBM, with its OS/2 2.0 Operating System.

This is going to open up old wounds for me, and I'll probably catch some flak at work for this as well, but considering that this war between Microsoft and IBM is long over, I'm going to do this anyway.

For the most part, in 1992, IBM succeeded in creating a "Better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows" with OS/2.

It was a full 32-bit OS, and could take advantage of much larger amounts of memory, which DOS and Windows 3.0 could not. It could pre-emptively multitask, whereas Microsoft's DOS and Windows 3.0 could not.

It could protect native OS/2 applications in discrete sections of memory, whereas DOS and Windows 3.0 could not.

It could also run DOS and Windows 3.0 applications in their own protected, separate regions of memory, which DOS and Windows ... could not.

It was the first PC operating system to ship with Windows virtualization included in the OS. It was amazingly ahead of its time, in that respect.

OS/2 ran DOS and Windows 3.0 applications so well, in fact, that IBM had a very hard time getting third-party developers to write native OS/2 Presentation Manager applications.

Indeed, there were a few little gotchas with OS/2's Windows compatibility: It had problems for a time running Windows Enhanced Mode apps, and there were also issues with special types of device drivers, called VxDs.

Eventually, IBM was able to resolve most of these compatibility issues in future versions of OS/2. But it was always a constant battle to keep up with Microsoft's changes. And when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 in 1993, most of the perceived advantages that OS/2 had were no longer considered exclusive by the computer industry.

Today, you recognize Windows NT as Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows XP. And Windows 2000 before it.

BlackBerry is facing a very similar situation with its new mobile OS. Indeed, as I have written before, the QNX OS as it is implemented on BlackBerry's hardware is extremely impressive, resilient, and sophisticated.

This is to be expected of a mature, embedded real-time OS, which QNX is. For everything that distinguishes them, iOS, Android, and even Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are not RTOSes.

As a matter of fact, I believe it to be a superior operating system in a number of respects architecturally to both iOS and Android. I have been testing a Z10 for a few weeks now on AT&T, and I think it's a fun device, with some interesting differentiators that set it apart from those two platforms, as well as Microsoft's Windows Phone 8, which I also use, and like a great deal.

However, despite BlackBerry's RTOS DNA, there is a great deal of risk associated with attempting to leverage a competitor's ecosystem as opposed to being an active participant in it.

Originally, I had hoped that BlackBerry went the Virtualization route as opposed to a native Dalvik VM port/binary emulation layer to implement Android compatibility, which is how it actually went about it.

Ideally, for BlackBerry 10, I would have liked to have seen a full Android 4.x stack running inside a mobile hypervisor, such as OKL4 or Red Bend's VLX.

This would have required no "porting" work on RIM's behalf. Instead, an actual copy of Android, with a complete Linux kernel, could be run as a "Guest" OS within QNX. But it was not to be.

This is not to say that this approach would not have its own number of risks associated with it. The hypervisor would have to be very performance optimized, and near-native Android performance would be expected by BlackBerry 10's end users, or the compatibility mode would not have much value.

To make Android NDK apps work, hypervisor-based virtualization would have been the only effective way to accomplish true binary compatibility. But as BlackBerry 10 uses just the Dalvik part of Android, it can't run NDK apps. Those applications have to be ported using the native C/C++QNX SDK instead.

It should be noted that BlackBerry's Android 2.3.3 API implementation already has a number of other programmatic limitations in addition to the NDK.

Regardless of the way BlackBerry eventually chose to implement Android apps in its new mobile OS, there is the issue of whether Android compatibility will have the same "cooling effect" on its native C++ development environment as well as on the Adobe Air apps that IBM's Windows 3.0 compatibility had on OS/2.

There is another potential problem, and it isn't a small concern.

There is always the possibility that Google could implement architectural and code changes in its Dalvik VM as part of the Android Open Source Project in the future that could break BlackBerry's Dalvik implementation and cause serious compatibility issues with apps written to future versions of the Android API.

Should this occur, BlackBerry would need to re-port Google's Dalvik to QNX, on an ongoing basis, in order to keep up with the changes. The level of effort involved would not be insignificant, much like IBM had to keep OS/2's Windows compatibility in check.

Amazon's Kindle Fire also runs Android apps, and the company maintains its own app store. But the Kindle Fire is an Android device, based on actual AOSP code and Linux, whereas BlackBerry 10 emulates Android and runs a QNX kernel and userland libraries.

So the Kindle Fire will never have compatibility issues with Android, providing that Amazon always uses the latest AOSP stack.

Still, BlackBerry might not actually care what developers target their apps to, whether it's Android 2.3 Dalvik APIs, QNX C++ native, Adobe Air/Flash, or Java.

Oh, and then there's the WebWorks platform SDK as well. BlackBerry 10 is a literal smorgasbord of multi-vendor API's, probably the richest of all the mobile OSes currently available.

The big question is whether BlackBerry 10 will do all of them well. Will consumers "get it" and will developers bother to make enough native QNX apps to really showcase the platform?

I mean, if you're gonna buy a phone to run Android apps, why not just buy a Samsung S 4 that sports superior hardware in virtually every respect to the Z10?

Only time will tell.

Will BlackBerry 10's Android compatibility be a blessing, or a curse? Talk back and let me know.

Disclaimer: The postings and opinions on this site are my own and do not represent Microsoft's positions, strategies, or opinions.

I knew this article was in the making, and I was curious to see his take on mobile application transformation.

This is a subject a lot of enterprises are now struggling with, as there are a great number of Line of Business (LOB), in-house-designed and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications that they want to get out to tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks.

I was a bit disappointed to see this, however, so early in his article:

"The most basic thing you can do is let them dial into a Windows desktop through virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The problem with this approach is that you're trying to use a post-PC device to access a PC-era device. It can be very unsatisfying for users to operate systems in this way. It's an approach that works well enough if the user has to make very occasional access to a system, but if you're expecting that as the be-all and end-all of your solution, you should expect some light rebellion."

As a disclaimer, I happen to work at Microsoft, and part of what I am tasked to do at the company is to assist service providers in helping their enterprise customers as well as ISVs enable desktop applications for mobile consumption.

So you can either listen to me very seriously as a SME in this area, or take it with a grain of salt as vendor-motivated diatribe.

Now, with that bit of business out of the way, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the role of a mobile device in terms of how to best enable it for enterprise applications. 

With a mobile app, as Matthew lays out in his article, it is possible to present it as web/HTML, or expose it as web services on the server and have the app on the device interact with those web services, like most Windows Store (WinRT API) apps do today.

You can also have "fat" WinRT API and iOS and Android apps on ARM, but then you run into serious memory and processor limitations. So the question is, do you take a desktop app and turn it into SaaS and optimize it for remote viewing/execution and multi-user concurrency, or do you completely port it over to a new methodology entirely, which is a lot more work?

That's a big decision point for ISVs and enterprises today.

Because there's no easy way you can port a traditional Win32 desktop app to an ARM-based device. The memory and CPU constraints on a lot of these home-grown apps would not make a tablet or a smartphone an ideal platform for running them locally.

Dalvik and Android especially have issues with with large amounts of memory, as does native iOS code. In these cases, you are better suited to something like a SaaS approach like I described above.

Let's not even get to the real issue as it relates to the level of effort to do an application transformation to something a mobile device can consume natively. Any complex enterprise application will require separating the UI from the business logic and transactional processing engine, in order to make it multi-tier. 

If the enterprise has already done this, such as part of an overall SOA effort that might have taken place a few years ago, the application transformation approach Matt describes makes a lot of sense.

But the reality is that many enterprise apps are monolithic in nature, may have been running in their environments for a very long time, may lack appropriate documentation and original source code, and there may be institutional knowledge loss due to the fact that the original authors of the code may no longer be employed by the enterprise.

There's also the issue that many enterprises or SMBs just do not have the core competencies in-house to port desktop applications over to mobile platforms, or the budget for a systems integrator to do this for them.

In these cases, the quickest, most painless way to get your mobile devices running these apps are through DaaS technologies such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Citrix XenApp.

There are VDI technologies avaliable from these and competing vendors as well, but if we are specifically talking about application enablement, session-based methods make a lot more sense than what is bandied about as "VDI."

First, let's describe that "VDI" is. VDI is assigning an individual virtual machine (VM) running an instance of Windows for each user session running on a Type-1 hypervisor (Hyper-V, VMWare ESX, Xen, KVM) coming in over the network connection using VDI client software.

This is expensive on resources because you aren't getting the best possible density for the purposes of deploying an application to mobile users. There are a number of reasons why VDI makes sense for specific-use cases, which is too complicated to go into detail for the purposes of this article, but mass-deployment of a LOB enterprise or ISV app to a fleet of mobile users is not one of them.

For application deployment at the best scale, you want to look at session-based technology. Not VDI.

What's session-based technology? Well, it's been renamed a whole bunch of times over the years, but many of you may remember it originally as Citrix Winframe or Metraframe and on the client-side as the ICA session protocol, and on the Microsoft side as the RDP protocol, which was introduced into Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server in 1996. 

Today those technologies are branded as Citrix XenApp and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS). RDS is built into Microsoft Windows Server 2012, and RDP is now at version eight.

Neither XenApp nor Microsoft RDS need to be deployed using virtualization, although it is not uncommon to virtualize the session hosts themselves, as well as combine either of  these session-based technologies with App-V, for "sequencing" or streaming apps to the remote desktop to improve scalability of a session-based solution as well as to address application compatability concerns.

In any case, with session-based remote desktop and remote app implementations, you can expect at least double, if not quadruple or even eight times or higher the density of "pure VDI" solutions.

Why would you want to use one or the other? It depends on a number of factors, including which kinds of target devices you want the application to run on.

The Microsoft RDS client is native to Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows RT and Windows Phone 8, and there are some third parties actively developing RDPv8 clients for Android and iOS. 

Citrix, on the other hand, has the widest array of endpoint device support, with native versions of their Receiver avaliable for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows RT, and Windows XP/7/8.

Additionally, from a Provider/Enterprise application management and endpoint provisioning perspective, as well as the ability to provide an excellent portal that ties together a lot of the automation and device management needed to make a remote mobile application scale, Citrix brings a lot to the table. Although this is at extra cost, since their client license sits on top of Microsoft's RDS client access licenses and server.

Citrix has also recently released a Mobile Application SDK that allows Windows applications to be optimized for viewing and remote execution on mobile platforms. In addition to better enablement for touch devices, remote applications that are optimized with this SDK are able to utilize on-board GPS, sensors, cameras, and device buttons in the same way that locally running, native applications do.

The bottom line is this: If you want to transform a desktop application and make it available to mobile devices, the quickest path and the one of least resistance is to seek a session-based solution.

Are you looking to enable your Desktop Application for use in your enterprise's mobile devices? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

As I said in that piece, I've been a professional telecommuter for seven years now. Five of those were spent at IBM, and two of them were spent at Unisys.

I joined Microsoft's SMS&P organization, which is is based out of Microsoft's national headquarters in Bellevue, Washington in December of last year.

Our business unit within that much larger group, which focuses on supporting our North American hosting and service provider industry partners with Microsoft's technology and helping them release their own cloud service offerings, is a tightly knit team of approximately 75 people.

While a good number of them are based in the Puget Sound area, a bunch of us are located in Southern California, Washington DC, Baltimore, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia and Florida, among other places. I also collaborate with colleagues located in the EMEA regions as well.

We are a fully distributed team, and while we do get together on occasion for teaming types of exercises and for partner-facing events, and we also do some travel to visit partners at their place of business, the majority of our workflow occurs in our home offices.

Are we an efficient and dynamic organization? Do we get our work done? Absolutely.

Certainly, we could get our work done with the traditional tools I had at my disposal at IBM, such as regular email and scheduling applications and conference line services such as AT&T.

However, my telecommuting experience and my ability to get closer to the folks with whom I work have been made that much better by the use of Lync, Microsoft's integrated VOIP/Video Conferencing/Group Presenting/Instant Messaging solution.

Now that I have Lync, I don't want to go back to doing things the old way. Why? Because it makes conferencing and communicating via voice and instant messaging effortless.

I've been using the Lync 2013 client on Windows 8 since I started at the company. It turns any PC into a powerful corporate desk and video IP phone which has access to our entire company directory via Exchange and the Active Directory Global Address List (GAL).

So I can call anyone at Microsoft, leave them a voice mail if they aren't in, or ping them with a quick IM if needed.

I can also call out to regular phone lines outside the company with an Enterprise Voice account.

It works with a wide array of Lync-compatible USB or wireless speakerphones/bluetooth extenders, such as the Plantronics Callisto, which I use on my desk at home in combination with my webcam.  

This in and of itself is pretty neat, and the audio quality is excellent even with my lousy, 18Mbps/1.5Mbps VDSL residential broadband.

But that's not why I love this thing.

As a dispersed team, we have to do a lot of conference calls. If you've had to work in an organization where this is the case, and you have to use a confernece service, you know how frustrating it can be to have to call into the number, and remember a long conference code.

It's one thing if you have your own permanent bridge number that you use all the time, but if you are calling into a conference set up by someone else, you better have it written down or can see it on the screen.

With Lync, you don't need to do that. The software is fully integrated into Exchange, so whenever you set up a call, you click a button for "New Lync Meeting" and it sets up a virtual conference line as well as the appointment blocked out in your Outlook calendar along with the meeting invites to the folks that need to join.

When it comes time to call in, you just click on "Join Lync Meeting" in the meeting entry and everyone gets connected to the conference.

Once they have joined, people can:  turn on their webcams; upload PowerPoint presentations to show the group or other document types for folks to download; and present the output of applications on their desktop. They can also instant message the group with URLs and anything else that is needed.

It just works.

Now, obviously you can't be at your desk at the home office all the time. I frequently have meetings in the local Miami/Fort Lauderdale metro area and also when I am travelling. I also have to attend conference calls when I'm at the airport, during breakfast, out eating lunch or dinner, or when I am out doing an errand or even in my car.

So how do you deal with this?

Well, in the old days, if I was using a dumb phone for business purposes -- which is what I was issued when I worked at IBM -- I would write down the call-in number and code (on a personal smartphone which I also carried) and call in at the right time.

Hopefully, I also would enter -- manually -- that appointment into my smartphone to remind me of the call, just in case I got distracted with other things going on that day. But sometimes I forgot to do that.

Have you ever had to multitask between your calendar, look up the number, jump back into the dialer, and hope you remembered it correctly? Not fun.

This is totally eliminated with Lync. Whether I am using my Windows Phone, my iPhone or an Android phone, all I need to do is click on a calendar entry for the call, and the mobile version of the Lync client contacts the remote server, and calls me on the phone, directly inserting me into the conference. Very slick.

And yes, if my data service goes down, I do have a manual, old-school conference number I can call into if I need to.

Now, that was with Lync 2010 mobile client. But this week, we were all migrated to a Lync 2013 server back-end, and Microsoft also released the Windows Phone 8, Windows Store (Modern UI) and iOS Lync 2013 native clients.

So not only can the software initiate the callback, but it can also use a Wi-Fi or a 4G data connection to do pure end-to-end VOIP as well as video conferencing, and on Windows RT tablets and iPads, we can also use (many of) the same screen and presenting features as well. 

So yes, I'm a telecommuter and I'm an effective remote worker. But much of that I attribute to Lync making life a lot easier for me.

Does your organization use Lync and has it improved your collaboration and communication experience? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

It's hitting that time of year again when Apple typically does product refreshes of its iPad line. But 2012 was a weird year for iPad refreshes, with the iPad mini and iPad 4th-generation updates back in early November, and a minor 128GB SKU refresh for the iPad 4th-generation just last month, in February of 2013.

Still, the rumor mill is spinning wildly and it points towards a possible release of Apple's flagship tablet between April and June of this year. Some industry observers think it could be as late as October, but I'm going to err on the earlier side rather than later.

Whether it happens next month, or late spring, we're definitely seeing an update.

The question really isn't when the update is happening, but what will be in it. Here's our top list of stuff we expect to see in the updated iPad line.

Recent leaks of purported iPad 5 parts coming out of China strongly seem to indicate that the updated version of Apple's flagship, full-sized tablet will share the industrial design of its smaller sibling, the iPad mini.

Tightening of the bezel area as well as using a slimmer casing will result in a lighter product as well as update a basic design that hasn't changed fundamentally since the iPad 2.

The iPad 5 is likely to have the exact (or nearly the same) display resolution as the iPad 4 and iPad 3 that preceded it, at around 2560x1536 pixels. However, the important changes in this display are going to occur in switching to a different display manufacturing process, referred to as Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide, or IGZO, for short.

IGZO technology was developed by Japanese electronics giant SHARP along with Semiconductor Energy Laboratories. The zinc oxide replaces the silicon used in the amorphous layer in existing TFT displays and has a number of advantages, including a vast increase in electron mobility (over 40 times that of amorphous silicon) resulting in a higher reaction speed over previous technologies.

Moving to IGZO also would mean a thinner sandwich for the LCD panel and also translating into less weight, as well as improved luminosity and increased power efficiency.

Why do we think Apple is going to IGZO? Because SHARP has announced that as of April of 2012, it would be producing 10" 2560x1600 and 7" 1280x800 IGZO panels in large quantities.

So it would seem iPad 5 and iPad mini 2nd-generation are both getting an IGZO boost.

It goes without saying that Apple is likely to use a higher-megapixel CMOS in the rear and forward iSight cameras. It would not surprise me to see 8MP in the rear and 2MP in the front, particularly for newer augmented-reality apps as well as high-definition Facetime and possible facial gesture recognition and security enhancements to Siri and iOS 7.

Additionally, I expect some improvements in the lens elements to allow for improved image capture in lower-light scenarios, as well as improved image stabilization software.

With Apple facing a lot of competition now from Samsung's home-grown high-performance Exynos 5 processor used in the Nexus 10 and the Galaxy S 4 smartphone, we're likely to see some serious improvements in Apple's own silicon with the introduction of the A7.

Although the design of this chip is highly secretive, one can infer that the company is going to move to the ARM Cortex-A15 architecture for at least two CPU processor cores, clocked at a minimum of 1.7Ghz.

While the use of a Quad-core SoC design in the iPad 5 is likely, we may very well see the A7 conceived as a "hybridized" chip using custom silicon, which might utilize a combination of two or more fast, higher-clocked ARM Cortex-A15 cores and perhaps two or more smaller, lower-power and slower ARM Cortex-A7 cores, so that applications will run on a "cluster" of cores best suited to their workload, thus making the SoC more energy-efficient.

This hybrid core technology, known as big.LITTLE and licensed by ARM Holdings, could very well make it's way into the A7 in the iPad 5 and iPhone 5S, or in the iPad 6. Samsung has already announced its own big.LITTLE chip in the form of the Exynos Octa which will be used in some international carrier (GSM) versions of the Galaxy S 4.

North American (CDMA) versions of the Galaxy S 4 may use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, which is a quad-core design. 

It also goes without saying that we are also likely to see a 2x or more boost in GPU processor power over the A6X, increasingly moving the needle closer to the capabilities of their PC and console counterparts and enabling the most demanding games on tablet hardware. An 8-core GPU design using PowerVR Series 6 technology is not out of the question. 

The iPad 4 saw an improvement over the built-in wireless networking capabilities of the iPad 3 and iPad 2 with a dual spatial stream, dual antenna 802.11a/b/g/n transceiver. This effectively more than doubled the previous generation's wireless networking speeds from 65Mbps up to a reported 150Mbps.

We expect that Apple will move to Qualcomm's latest WCN3680 Atheros 80211ac-compatible chipset which will allow the iPad and presumably the next version of the iPhone and Apple TV to communicate using anywhere between two and four spatial streams, enabling the device to transmit and receive data up to 300Mbps to 450Mbps, and with longer range and less power consumption than its predecessors.

802.11ac capability would of course require upgrading to an 802.11ac-compatible wireless router as well as updated Airplay-compatible devices in order to fully take advantage of the new chipset, so presumably a new 4th-generation Apple TV and a new version of the Airport Extreme is also in the offing.

The upside of this increased speed will be much smoother playback of 720p and 1080p streamed Airplay content from the device as well as more responsive, higher-fidelity screen mirroring.

An updated Qualcomm Atheros chipset in the iPad 5/iPad mini 2 and iPhone 5S would also mean updated, more power-efficient world phone + multicarrier LTE capability as well as an updated, more power-efficient Bluetooth 4.0 implementation as well.

With the introduction of the iPhone 5, iPad 4 and iPad mini, Apple moved to the new "Lightning" connector and phased out the old 30-pin dock connector, much to the chagrin of many folks with older-style accessories.

But the new Lightning connector has many advantages, such as the ability to charge at higher than 10 Watts, as well as electronic inversion for goof-free insertion. 

Apple introduced a 12-Watt charger with the iPad 4 for faster charging. It's possible we may see even a higher wattage charger with the iPad 5, such as 15 watts, if Apple has made refinements to the technology.

Additionally, it is possible that we may finally see the introduction of Apple's own proprietary magnetic induction charging, incorporated in the form of an updated smart cover accessory, based on recent USPTO patent publication of filings from September 2011, shown in the illustration above.

It's a given that with any major improvement in the iPad, we're going to see improvement in the base operating system.

While it's possible that the 5th-generation device might ship with an iteration of iOS 6, it's far more likely we will see a transformational upgrade with iOS 7 in 2013, which will include enhancements for human interface, such as more intelligence and improved voice response built into Siri, as well as major overhauls of built-in apps such as Maps, Mail, Safari and Calendar.

We're likely to see the introduction of badly-needed changes to the aging, although still-useful and user-friendly UX paradigm along with an updated, cleaner look and feel that will almost certainly result in the elimination of all vestiges of skeumorphism from the OS, as a side-effect of the exit of former iOS chief Scott Forstall from the company back in October of 2012, who was a major proponent of the skeumorph UX ideology.

Since the release of iOS 6, Apple's competitors have been releasing new and innovative features in their operating systems, such as the advanced multi-tasking and social feeds in BlackBerry OS 10, as well as numerous incremental UI improvements in Android Jelly Bean 4.2 as implemented in the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, and not to mention quick-glance information telemetry with the "Live Tiles" implemented in Microsoft's Modern UI as part of Windows RT, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Will Apple incorporate any of these ideas from their competitors? It's hard to tell. But Steve Jobs was noted for saying "Good artists copy, Great artists steal."

Our own Zack Whittaker put together a gallery of potential iOS 7 improvements which I encourage you to read. 

Maybe I am jaded. Maybe I've been playing with these devices for too long. Or maybe the Android arms race has now escalated to the point where product differentiation has been reduced to "who's first to integrate the latest hardware components."

I have not been using an Android smartphone for some time now. I passed my Samsung Galaxy Nexus along to my wife, who is perfectly happy with it. I now have an iPhone 5 for personal use and a Nokia 920 Windows Phone 8 device as my business phone.

But I am always watching the progress of Android smartphone technology, if only because I continue to use Android tablets (I own a Nexus 10, among other devices) — and there is always a chance I may reconsider my position and go back to an Android device as my personal phone. Afterall, the platform continues to evolve.

With the release of the Samsung S4, however, I've come to the conclusion that it would take a majorly disruptive effort by Google and the OEMs to get me back as a smartphone customer. To quote perhaps the greatest blues guitarist in the entire world, B.B. King, The thrill is gone, baby. The thrill has gone away.

Sure, I'll continue to buy Android tablets in order to follow developments with the OS and keep pace with the industry. I'll also continue to do the same with iPads as well as Windows RT devices like Microsoft's Surface. That's a no-brainer, considering that with Wi-Fi only devices, there's no carrier commitment and you're not tied at the hip to the thing all day long. 

However, a smartphone is a commitment. Not only do you need to carry it all the time, but at least here in the United States, the major wireless carriers require two-year contracts in order to provide smartphones at a subsidized price level.

As with B.B's story of the baby that done him wrong, one has to have a trusted and intimate relationship with one's smartphone. Without being particularly excited about the technology, it's hard for me — as a smartphone user — to justify going back into the Android ecosystem.

The Galaxy S4, it seems to me, was created in part to address Samsung's need to become increasingly independent of Google from a software differentiation standpoint. This includes a gradual move to more homespun solutions like Tizen, as my colleague James Kendrick has pointed out in his most recent piece today.

In addition to independence from Google's implementation of Android, the creation of the Galaxy S4 is part of a critical path in Samsung's device evolution towards becoming 100 percent vertically integrated, and reducing their dependence on external component suppliers. Sounds a lot like what Apple is doing, right?

Like the Google Nexus 10, which the company also manufactured, the Samsung Galaxy S4 represents the integration of even more of the company's own home-brewed hardware components, such as their Exynos 5 series SoC, into mass-market smartphones.

This has nothing to do with bringing excitement and innovation to the end-user. This is purely an economics and margins play.

Please don't interpret this as a negative. I believe vertical integration is an important part of any device manufacturer's recipe for overall success.

But as my Editor-in-Chief and colleague Larry Dignan points out, Samsung's directions, translation and cloud storage features are simply duplications of what Google has in their native Android implementation already. It's very hard to say that this is actual differentiation and value-add.

It would certainly not surprise me if Samsung, along their their increasingly deviated Android build and default applications, built out their own App Store to compete with Google Play, just as Amazon has done with their own Android implementation on the Kindle Fire.

So yes, the Galaxy S4 is a nice piece of hardware. But at the end of the day, it's just another Android phone, and one that is only distinguishing itself in component integration and ecosystem (albeit duplicated) land-grab.

But exciting? A product I want to use and make a contract commitment to? No. 

Is the thrill gone with Samsung's Android devices? Talk Back and Let Me Know.