I am always amazed by how far technology advances year on year and I am glad to be working in the technology area. When I received my Teensy 3.0 I thought I would show it to my parents who have both worked with computers since when mainframes were really being introduced and worked for a company called Tandem. They produced the circuit board visible in the images which I believe is an IO board for a tandem non stop 2. For a full computer they said that there was a minimum of 3 boards required IO, processor and memory not to mention the connection to data storage on tape or hard disk platters. The cost of the board shown would have been approx £50k making the entire computer and installation cost in the £1million ball park. Comparing this to the Teensy 3.0 which takes a USB and pins to interface in and out it is just incredible to see how far things have come.

Yesterday we showed Store Trek at the IAB Engage. To see details about the event and pictures from the great speakers click here

Earlier this week Nic Doodson, Dan Mcnamara and I, representing Keytree, headed over to Las Vegas to participate in SAP TechEd Las Vegas. This was held in the Venetian Resort, the largest hotel in the world (largest hotels wiki) and was a phenomenal event to be involved in. I had the opportunity to share with Dan our experiences of using SAP NetWeaver Cloud and SAP HANA to an audience in Lounge 1 on the show floor, exhibit CEO Vision in Vishal’s Q&A session after the Keynote with Nic, compete in DemoJam with Nic showing Store Trek, attend sessions about the latest SAP innovations and much more.

Store Trek run through in the hotel suite

It all started when we entered Store Trek into DemoJam and it was accepted for Las Vegas. All of our kit was packed up and flown out to Vegas to show off our new concept of shopping backed by SAP NetWeaver Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud.

On arrival we setup the kit in the hotel suite to run through the presentation and to check all kit survived the flight. This is actually a perfect implementation idea for Store Trek where it is embedded as a shopping experience  in your home or hotel room. During the kit check I was able to order my next week’s groceries for when I returned to the UK.

On Tuesday morning we performed CEO Vision in Vishal’s Q&A and showed a section of what that system can do, demonstrating the power of SAP HANA in the Cloud and SAP NetWeaver Cloud as well which the backend has now been moved to from a SAP HANA instance.(Click here to watch CEO Vision)

Tuesday we had rehearsals with all the other Demo Jam contestants and made sure everything was ready for the evening’s performance. I would like to thank Bill Buxton and all of the production team who made it possible for us to deliver our demo in such an incredible way. The Demo Jam itself was an amazing experience  with the opportunity to watch the other acts. It was a really tough competition and some great technologies. Here is our performance in full:

We won SAP Demo Jam, in a very close competition with a lot of fantastic technologies being shown and some truly inspiring teams.

On the following day, I did an interview with Gigi Read on TechEd Live see below (Nic was unfortunately already on a plane back to the UK) watch it here

As I said in the interview with Gigi we are now gearing up our update to CEO Vision for Madrid TechEd and are really looking forward to it.

Over the past year or so there has been an explosion of electronic development boards so you can build your own DIY projects and feed the hobbyists desires. I have been no exception and have quite a few boards including the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, LaunchPad from Texas Instruments and the latest addition of the Teensy 3.0. I have added a bit about each board and how I have used them.

Teensy 3.0

I have only just received my board so still have to solder the headers onto the board so I can easily use with a breadboard. I donated on Kickstarter and cannot wait to get started with this board.

Teensy 3.0 is a small, breadboard-friendly development board designed by Paul Stoffregen and PJRC.  Teensy 3.0 will bring a low-cost 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 platform to hobbyists, students and engineers, using Arduino(R)** or programming directly in C language.

Based on a 32 bit ARM chip, Teensy 3.0 aims to greatly increase the computing capability and peripheral features, but maintain the same easy-to-use platform that has made Teensy 2.0 so successful. Find out more

LaunchPad

The MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad is an easy-to-use flash programmer and debugging tool for the MSP430G2xx Value Line microcontrollers. It features everything you need to start developing on an MSP430 microcontroller device. Find out more

Arduino

I really like the arduino board and have experimented quite a bit with this and really forms the core of the electronics DIY toolkit.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Find out more

Raspberry Pi

The raspberry pi is a very versatile board and with the available connections is great to work with. One of the first things I did with it was connecting it to Vuzix Star 1200 glasses head up displays:

I have used these on several personal projects and then they formed the display drivers for the Project Glass Inspired Translation.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming. Find out more

Size Comparison

A few more images

My Teensy 3.0 from Kickstarter project by Paul Stoffregen arrived and am looking forward to getting to grips soon.

Teensy 3.0 is an affordable 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 board, for development in Arduino or C/C++.

Transcript of N2K video:

Modern technology has also come up with some clever options when it comes to translating languages. One space age idea is a riff on google’s project glass. Keytree’s version of the project glass is a pair of glasses that automatically translate other languages and displays subtitles to ease your understanding. Considering the number of complex systems and bulk devices needed to make this system work, the system isn’t for practical use but just a glimpse into the future.

Thank you N2K, check out their site

µSpeech (muSpeech)

This library is for arduino and provides an interface for voice recognition using the Arduino, which does voice recognition in a way different from most high powered voice recognition methods. It calculates the complexity of the signal is determined by taking the absolute derivative of the signal multiplying it by a fixed point saclar and then dividing it by the absolute integral of the signal. This project is hosted on github so go take a look.
http://arjo129.github.com/uSpeech/

Dragon Naturally Speaking

Developed by Nuance this is one of the most advanced voice recognition offerings out there. The SDKs are available for client use or as a server side service.
http://www.nuance.co.uk/for-developers/dragon/index.htm

Microsoft Speech API

Offered by microsoft and integrated into kinect for windows parts (tutorial here), it provides voice recognition of a word or phrase from a set list.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd266409.aspx

AT&T Watson Speech Recognition

This offering by AT&T provides full voice recognition from a cloud based offering but uses advanced category indication to help Watson identify what you are saying. ie you can tell it if the category is business and it refines it’s recognition.
http://www.research.att.com/projects/WATSON/index.html?fbid=_wsE6gQcLDc

iSpeech

Part of one of the most successful apps on android, iOS and Playbook iSpeech provides a Text to Speech cloud service that is easy to use and integrate. They offer mobile SDKs to get you up and running quickly.
http://www.ispeech.org/

SpeechFX

This recognition SDK performs continuous recognition giving you full voice trasncoding.
http://www.speechfxinc.com/voicein.html

Voxler

Provides speech recognition for 25 major languages.
http://www.voxler.fr/index.php/what-we-do/speech-recognition-sdk

Sphynx Voice Recognition

This is a good open source voice recognition solution.
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

The supermarket where you never have to queue

 

At Keytree we have created a new application called Store Trek that delivers a 3D shopping experience in your home using the microsoft Kinect.

Powered by K-Motion Store technology. This is the first incarnation of a 3D store that crosses the divide between in store and online shopping. Online is quick and convenient and products are recommended to you but the experience is not very engaging or immersive. In store you can see entire product ranges but they are not tailored to you, you have to travel to the store and get stuck in the queue at checkout. Store Trek takes the benefits of in store by delivering tailored virtual shelves in a virtual store layout driven by a personalisation engine you would have with an online store.

The kinect allows you to walk round the TV with the shelves automatically adjusting to give you the rich 3D experience. Rendering tens of thousands of products from real retailers in realtime you can purchase items by reaching out towards the shelf and the product will be added directly to your basket.

This eCommerce solution based in the cloud could be used to shop for your groceries from Tesco or items from Amazon or Ebay.

Update: Store Trek was featured in Marketing Magazine click here to see the article

Update: Store Trek has also been featured in the independent click here to see the article the supermarket experience where you never have to queue.