After the great interest in the first blog, Has complexity killed the engineering bug? from Matt Berggren - we'd thought we make post up our latest offering from Rob Irwin, 'Kindling the fires of innovation'.
Rob Irwin's blog post for New Electronics:
Exerpt:
Down here in Australia there's been a flurry of media interest in Amazon's new version of its Kindle DX electronic book reader device.
It's not primarily with the device itself, but because with it, Amazon are opening up the device – and the ecosystem behind it – to Australian (and other non-US) residents. We'll be able to do what US residents have been doing for ages – buy a book online from Amazon and download it directly to the Kindle without the need for an intermediate stop at our PC on the way through.
This concept may seem on the surface like a fairly trivial thing, but it is the tip of the global technological iceberg that the electronics industry and engineers need to pay some attention to, or risk a Titanic-like encounter that will leave many in the industry fighting over the lifeboats.
In talking to some of my US colleagues, one of the most compelling things about the Kindle is that it opens up the vast resources of Amazon's online emporium without the need to use a PC, or indeed to find a WiFi hotspot or insert and configure any other form of connection device. You just turn the Kindle on and it connects – piggybacking on the US mobile phone network. From a users perspective, it just works.
The Kindle itself may ultimately succeed or fail in the market, but the concept that it represents – that of an internet of connected devices – is one that is going to define a new chapter in the evolution of electronics and redefine the impact of electronics on society.
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Read the rest at: http://ow.ly/WBYd