IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 4

CONTENT AND CONNECTIVITY
For video and audio content, you can
install a media center system to manage
content across network shares and networked hard disks-Xbox Media Center
was one classic open-source solution
that grew beyond the original Xbox and
seemed to get ported onto nearly everything. But does it interoperate with
other media server systems? Again,
Apple TV will talk with other Apple
TVs, Amazon Fire will work with
Amazon, and Roku understands Roku
boxes. Boxee tried to talk to everyone
but failed to migrate to "the cloud," and
now the hardware is obsolete.
But who needs these boxes anymore? After all, they are not much
more than hard disks with a friendly
user interface that runs over the network. Netflix makes them all obsolete
if you have the bandwidth and can store
the content in the cloud.

But again, this is not the point of this
editorial. Connectivity will happen, and
it will eventually become universal. It
does not matter how it happens-the
reality is that it will happen, driven by
the market need to scale and commercialize the growing bandwidth that is
available. What is important to remember in the context of this article is that it
is happening in a very disorganized way,
with many competing solutions and
without the right planning and thinking
in terms of high-level infrastructure
and cybersecurity.

THE GROWTH OF
PERSONAL CONTENT
I have written before about the age of
connected photography [1]. Today, we
are all empowered by our smartphones
to record and document our lives in a
way that simply was not possible even

CONNECTIVITY FOR THINGS
The newer products and services still
face the connectivity challenge. One
common approach is to provide your
own gateway for your devices. An
example we have discussed here before
is "Mother and the Motion Cookies"-
the "Mother" is the gateway and she
knows how to talk to her little "Cookies," who are actually simple programmable motion-sensing devices. I am not
sure how practical and useful Mother
might be, but she is a triumph of clever
marketing-the average consumer does
not even know what a "gateway" is, but
he can get the idea of Mother and see
that she looks after and talks to her
Cookies, er, I mean children.
But gateways are not an answer.
This reminds me of a presentation I
saw 25 years ago at a consumer electronics (CE) conference, where the presenter showed a TV set with a pile of
set-top boxes stacked on top. The point
was to eliminate all these conflicting
boxes and replace them with a single
one. But we already have that box-it
is the Wi-Fi router in your home. It just
needs to get a bit smarter, and we need
to make some industrywide efforts to
simplify the multitude of competing
standards and protocols out there today.
4 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

july 2015

Windows computers still
prefer to integrate with
other Windows computers,
Macs can talk to other
Macs, and the same
interoperability applies
with tablets and
smartphones.
a decade ago. Not only do we hold an
incredibly powerful camera and video
recorder in our hands every moment of
the day but it connects us to each other
so that personal gatherings, events,
and experiences can be captured and
shared in ways that were not previously possible.
Now we also have the cloud-a place
to share and store these daily memories.
No longer do they have to be trapped on a
home computer or a portable hard disk.
They can be conveniently available on
the network from anywhere in the world.
Many of us are going to accumulate large
quantities of digital content shaped initially around our daily lives, but as we
live and grow, so too will this store of
augmented memories.

YOUR LIFE IN THE CLOUD
I am mostly a Dropbox user. Recently, I
got to that tipping point where I had too
many things on Dropbox, and I had to
either migrate everything or progress to
a paid account. Of course, once your
storage passes a certain size, it is not
trivial to migrate it, and I was already
caught in this trap, having received one
of those 50-GB deals that comes with
some smartphones and cameras. Anyway, I decided that it was easier to take
the plunge rather than relocate my
50 GB of photos and videos. And I was
a bit curious to see what it is like to
have almost unlimited online storage.
Well, actually it is quite strange-I
now have a terabyte of cloud storage
for quite a reasonable annual fee, and I
am guessing that the storage limit will
undoubtedly increase year-on-year. In
fact, it is likely to become a vicious circle as I shoot more videos and photos,
now in 4K resolution courtesy of my
latest smartphone. So, quite soon, I am
going to be looking at migrating a
terabyte or upgrading again.
Now let us step back a bit and consider what is happening. Many of us are
now recording and documenting our
own lives and those of our friends and
families, storing this growing mass of
content online. Many nuances and personal details of our lives are now stored
at a level that simply was not previously
possible. It is the Memex of Vannevar
Bush but more powerful and more interconnected than he envisaged.

THE DISSOLUTION OF PRIVACY
Consider the next generation-the
Google Generation as I like to call them.
They live in a world of devices and have
the time to learn and experiment. They
are growing in a world where Facebook
is your badge of honor and daily experiences are shared momentarily with
Snapchat-a picture without words. But
all this sharing and exchanging of visual
data becomes an instinctive and natural
part of how they express themselves and
how they view the world.
It is simply quite natural for youngsters to snap and share, and they are
growing to see nothing wrong in capturing scenes from family life that are quite

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015