Our transition from a rural to an urban lifestyle means we spend far more time inside homes and offices and on the roads connecting them. And that means exposure to a huge number of gases leaking from the walls, carpets, industrial facilities and cars. It would be good to know the locations where the concentration of these gases are harmful to peoples' health.

Singapore based uHoo today announced a digital device that can detect a large number of harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide, ozone, and volatile organic solvents in the air along with sensor data on air pressure, humidity, dust and temperature. 

The device is 3.3 inches by 6.2 inches and connects with local wi-fi. Software allows users to monitor air quality in several locations at once via their smartphone. 

Silent killer...

Dustin Jefferson Onghanseng, CEO and co-founder of uHoo, said:"The less known silent killer among us is indoor air quality, which can be up to five times worse than outdoor air. Couple that with unhealthy indoor air being linked to cancer and heart disease, 6 in 10 homes being hazardous to their owner's health and half of America's schools having issues related to indoor air quality, a product that detects the particles and chemicals we breathe in real-time can transform people's health."

The company cites research by the University of California at Berkeley that estimates that healthy indoor air quality translates into higher productivity and health care savings of as much as $669 per person a year.

The uHoo device is available as a pre-order for $89. http://www.uhooair.com/

Background Info from uHoo:

The idea for uHoo started as a conceptual idea to solve a serious problem between co-founder Dustin Jefferson S. Onghanseng whose background is in management consulting for the healthcare industry and his colleague Jean-Pierre Wack whose background is in green building design. Dustin who has suffered from hay fever since childhood, realized that air quality made a difference between "getting by" and feeling healthy. Suffering from bad air quality in Hong Kong led him down a path of research and discovery.

Dustin teamed up with electrical engineer Brian Lin, an asthma sufferer, and industrial and mechanical engineer Yoshimasa Suzuki, and after recruiting more engineers, the team pitched uHoo in a number of competitions from Bangkok and Shanghaim to Hong Kong and Portland Oregon, clinching the competition in China, which led to several milestones, including TechInAsia voting uHoo as one of Asia's top ten young startups to watch.

For nearly two years, they built a product, incorporating the most important features and benefits from their focus group feedback. Today, uHoo is the most advanced indoor air quality detector on the market, with eight dedicated sensors.

The company is headquartered in Singapore, with R&D in Hong Kong and production in Taiwan. Their marketing and design teams are in California.

uHoo has raised a seed round from East Ventures out of Asia, funding from an IndieGoGo campaign in Q2 2016 for marketing and plans to do a series A round later this year.

Google Confirms Plans for Wireless Service - NYTimes.com by Brian Chen.

A person briefed on Google’s plans... said the company wanted to make use of the fiber network it had installed in various cities to create an enormous network of Wi-Fi connections that phones could use to place calls and use apps over the Internet. In areas out of reach, Google’s network would switch over to cell towers leased by T-Mobile USA and Sprint, this person said. - NYTimes March 2 2015

From SiliconValleyWatcher August 2005:

What's Google up to? It's going to become a wireless telco with its own fat backbone...

I think it is very clear what Google's strategy is, or rather has to be. I think it is getting ready to do a wireless telco buy. Because everything is rapidly being walled up into gated communities, and the gatekeepers are the cable companies and the wireless mobile phone companies...

Google is not interested in search. It is interested in connecting the dots in user behavior. My cell phone can tell Google a huge amount of information about my user behaviors. And as Om Malik at Business 2.0 GigaOm, rightly points out, location is a powerful thing when you are in the contextual ad business... 

Eric Schmidt, on Charlie Rose, said the mobile phone is more important than the PC, because there are huge areas of the world where the PC-based Internet doesn't reach but wireless cell phone technologies can. "We'll get them all, even the ones in the trees," he said...

 

The wireless telcos won't allow the PC-ization of their markets because they saw how Intel and Microsoft sucked in all the margin from the PC market, leaving PC makers with crumbs...

 It [Google] has to hedge its bets and it has to become a wireless telco. 

Above reprinted from Silicon Valley Watcher August 2005

I'm looking forward to this evening's launch party for the Trunx app, which I got a chance to preview recently, in a meeting with VP of Marketing Sandra Ponce de León (above).

The app is apt for today's concerns about privacy and the sharing of photos. It uses the cloud to securely store all your camera photos. If you lose your phone, or someone else tries to access your photos, they can't. 

I also like that the Trunx launch party is a food drive for local charities. It's a very good idea and I'd love to see others take up this, too.

What if every launch event had some charity connection? You could do variations, such as "turn up and we'll donate money" or "bring children's toys" or get a chance to volunteer for some programs.

It would make turning up for launch events so much more appealing. More info about the Trunx app: Trunx - Peace through Privacy on the App Store on iTunes

Trunx - Peace through Privacy from Trunx App on Vimeo.

Do you know where all your digital photos are? Who owns them?
Trunx lets you take back ownership of your "visual legacy", and gives you peace of mind knowing your memories will be safe forever in your own private vault in the cloud.
+ Get your own private vault to store all your photos and videos in one place, auto-organized by date and time
+ Capture photos and videos directly from Trunx, using ZERO storage on you phone
+ Sync your Camera Roll, freeing your device of precious space
+ Import photos from Facebook and Instagram and take back ownership
+ Password protected, your photos and videos are for your eyes only - until you choose to share

The above Mother Jones article is depressing but it reminded me of an idea I‘d been thinking about. As the US  pulls out of Afghanistan and Iraq, I have a proposal: Give every child pre-loaded tablets filled with apps and Western culture, so that they can see we’re not all bad. 

Fill an iPad mini, (or any other tablet) with top Hollywood movies, books, music, Wikipedia, medical information,  and loads of learning apps. Also, load an unerasable copy of the Koran into them so that they can’t be destroyed.

Put a lot of Taliban literature in it too. Let the Taliban have an app in all the AppStores.

And let the new tablet owners decide for themselves which culture has the most to offer them. Or they can pick and choose from a huge range of ideologies and religious interpretations.An Internet connected tablet is truly a window on the modern world in a way that no other single device has ever been able to achieve.

It’s a high definition media delivery device and it’s a high-definition media broadcasting device. It’s a mobile Gutenberg press and it’s the paper.

There’s never ever been a product like today’s camera equipped tablets — they can be used to create important media, and display it.  It’s both sides of the screen at once.

They are a creation of this extraordinary media age that is permeating into every nook and cranny of society. Afghani and Iraqi kids should be offered the choice of joining in this unfolding modernity, the cost to entry is small. And there’s lots of advantages.

Young girls who face problems in getting the education they need would be able to study behind closed doors at home. Everyone would benefit from the factual and medical information they contain. And everyone would get a chance to sample our rich Western culture, which has succeeded in attracting people all over the world.

NGOs can build the supporting infrastructure of Wi-Fi and recharging stations. I hear Mark Zuckerberg is keen on bringing connectivity to under-developed parts of the world. How about a joint-funding with Bill Gates’s fund — every iPad is distributed with a mosquito net and a polio vaccine pill. Jeff Bezos can deliver each one along with a free Amazon Prime membership for every family, and before long there’s many other brands that would love to hop on, with small gifts of their own. We could win the war with a shower of love, with what our society loves — high-quality materialism. It works for us so why wouldn’t it work for others too?

The iPad gift basket for kids program wouldn’t cost much given the billions of dollars already spent. It would be a thoughtful parting gift that says, “Sorry about all the other stuff, we meant well if even if it didn’t always seem that way. Enjoy your iPad and gift vouchers.”

SF/Silicon Valley Public Schools should be showcases not basket cases.

Here’s a fabulous initiative led by New York city’s most successful VC, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures:

My colleagues at The NYC Foundation For Computer Science Education and I are raising a $5mm seed fund to invest in computer science education in the NYC public school system… and now we are now opening it up to others who want to participate alongside of us.

A VC: The Computer Science Education Fund

It’s a wonderful idea that needs to be replicated here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley public schools. Our public schools are broken but they should be showcases for Silicon Valley and not basket cases with nearly 50% dropout rates.

Fred Wilson writes:

I got to this place initially out of self interest (how to get more coders for our portfolio companies in NYC?), but it quickly became about way more than that. When you walk into a school and see kids from neighborhoods like Brownsville and the South Bronx sitting in front of laptops and making software using modern tools like Ruby On Rails, Github, and StackOverflow, you see a pathway for them and for our city and for our country to change what ails us.

Who will step up from our West Coast community and meet the challenge thrown down by Fred Wilson and his colleagues? Mark Zuckerberg I bet. But maybe the Life under Glass brigade will feel their smart watches buzzing that’s it’s time to pony up the money and the organization?

Go West…

Or maybe the cynical and insular VCs of Sand Hill Road will sit back and wait for the NYC kids to head west like the others have done? And thank the East Coast VCs for training up the next generation of foot soldiers for Silicon Valley’s startups.

But that trek west might not happen. Urban density means many new startup ideas will be born from experiences and problems New York city kids and their families face daily. Some of those ideas will be truly groundbreaking and Fred Wilson and his pals will be positioned at the head of a potential gold mine of deal flow.

Start local, go global. The next big ideas will come from dense urban centers where kids and their families are dealing with common problems. And by being able to code they’ll be able to quickly throw together some great ideas. 

Silicon Valley techies sit inside their gilded cages, being fed gourmet meals, and talking to themselves; they don’t interact much at all with the communities of regular people that live around them. Not many great ideas will emerge when they don’t emerge. That’s why there’s so many To Do lists and email management apps.

Ugly ducklings of NYC…

There's bound to be some wonderful Black Swan startups that'll grow from the ugly ducklings of New York's public schools... Again, Silicon Valley only funds a meritocracy of male Ivy Leaguers, all have the same experiences and think the same, which is not a formula for generating startups that make a difference, by being different.

A lot of the obvious low-hanging fruit has been exploited with software/web apps, and the next generation of opportunities will be more domain specific, and that means knowing your domain. Urban cultures have many domains and some are common to all other urban centers.

I wish the New York educational venture great success and I hope it inspires many copycats!

Silicon Valley VCs had better start pooling their money and set up a similar educational venture here in our public schools otherwise they’ll be missing out on the next blockbuster startups. It’s not a lot of money and our VCs could do with a better quality deal flow. Collectively, they aren’t doing that well.

- - -

A VC: The Computer Science Education Fund

10-Year Study Erases VC 'Smart Money' Claims -SVW

("Restore the Fourth" rally in San Francisco protesting NSA surveillance of US citizens.)

Declan McCullagh, the Washington correspondent for CNET, reports that the NSA and other agencies can force tech firms to comply with demands for real-time data on their users because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides them with legal rights to install their own gear inside their data centers.

How the U.S. is forcing Internet firms' hands on surveillance | Politics and Law - CNET News

Those devices, the companies fear, could disrupt operations, introduce security vulnerabilities, or intercept more than is legally permitted.

"Nobody wants it on-premises," said a representative of a large Internet company who has negotiated surveillance requests with government officials. "Nobody wants a box in their network... [Companies often] find ways to give tools to minimize disclosures, to protect users, to keep the government off the premises, and to come to some reasonable compromise on the capabilities."

It's tough to fight such demands because there are several legal precedents, such as when ISP Earthlink lost a legal battle to stop the FBI from installing its "Carnivore" surveillance system within its networks. 

Foremski's Take: 

US tech giants have been surveilling their users for years. That's what they mean by "Big Data" and it feeds a huge industry where that data is sold and used in real-time. That's how ad networks know what ads to serve to you in the milliseconds it takes to load a page.

It's commonly known as "contextual advertising."  But the "context" isn't the content of a page, the context is "who."

I'm sure you've noticed those sticky ads, the ones that follow you around the Internet. For example, I was seeing adverts for Tai Chi DVDs and books on numerous web sites for weeks because I had visited a Tai Chi site and clicked around for a bit. 

Advertising networks detect when and where you are online and your physical location.  In the instant it takes to load a page they analyze all the data they have about you and serve up an appropriate ad. They log the event and update their personalized dossier with any additional information they collect. 

In that regard, spy agencies and advertisers are essentially the same. They are both interested in real-time data about a specific person. It doesn't matter that one is trying to sell you a watch, while the other one just wants to watch -- the process is the same. 

Imagine if the NSA built an advertising network as a cover and bought access to the same real-time data that advertising networks use. It would be able to collect a lot of valuable data without needing to argue its case in secret courts.

It would have real-time login and other information, it could also drop a super-cookie or key-logger onto a target's computer.

It could even serve up contextual adverts: where to find hard-to-get combustible materials; or difficult to source equipment such as high-speed centrifuges. It would be perfect for sting operations.

But the government agencies should buy the data instead of demanding the right to take it. It's not that expensive and the suppliers will sort it and package it – saving them from having to filter and process the firehose of data from their own equipment installed on-site. 

Google Glass has a promissing future -- although not in the markets that Google thinks it's targetting: urban early-tech adopters -- they are a fickle bunch at best.

Where Google Glass will make its mark and find a large and loyal customer base is in helping families and communities deal with the ravages of old age.

We have a very large population of Baby Boomers. This is Generation A -- Aging on a massive scale, a population that's on a collision course with all the ills and predicaments that an older life brings.

Generation A is doing pretty well so far, but it can't live forever, even though it secretly thinks otherwise.

The realities of old age are well documented. Such as: brittle bones, difficulties in walking, small falls that can break hips, and many other injuries that were trivial when younger now become deadly. Prolonged physical inactivity due to injuries are a quick slide towards mortality. [Acturial tables are the original "Big Data" app.]

Older age brings other challenges such as muddled thoughts and for some, a slow slide into dementia because of Alzheimer's, or because of the effects of powerful medications.

With special Google Glass based applications, however, we could soften the problems that Generation A is facing. And it can be done at a very low cost -- probably for about the same amount of money as a monthly cell phone bill, which makes it affordable to nearly every family.

Here are some examples of Gen A Google Glass applications:

- Google Glass sensors can track a person's gait, and identify mobility problems that signal a potential fall and broken bones in the near future. Early warning signs can trigger preventative treatments and healthcare providers would be motivated to try stop a fall before it happens.

- Reminders for taking medication and preventing double dosing -- a big health problem. Plus reminders of family birthdays.

- People beginning to suffer from dementia would find Google Glass based apps tremendously useful. For example, the device could recognize family members and offer simple messages such as, "This is your son, his name is John. Say, "Hello John, how are my beautiful grandchildren?"

- When John asks his aged mother, "Do you remember the trip we took last year to Las Vegas?" Google Glass can run a quick replay video of the highlights. Not only would John's mother recall the trip but she could use John's wireless printer to print out her favorite photos for him, right there and then.

- Families are often separated from their older members because of jobs thousands of miles away. They could check-in with their parents very easily. With Google Glass-type devices, they could patch into what they are doing, even what they are seeing (there would be a "courtesy" filter to screen out any embarrassing scenes).

- And if there were a problem, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up," aid would be on the way in seconds.

- Finding old episodes of "The Rockford Files."

The possibilities for Google Glass are huge in this older market. Why do companies chase the 19 to 25 year old demographic? Those kids have little money and the entire generation has lousy job prospects.

The Baby Boomers of Generation A are the largest and wealthiest demographic of them all. They will love Google Glass.

- - -

Google's rush to Google Glass makes perfect sense, if you consider that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are 40, and 39 years old, respectively.

With every day they have more and more in common with 60 year-olds than with 20 year-olds. Google Glass is an exercise in future-comforting their old age.

[And so is the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, it's to ensure that Google's founders get a front seat on the bus ride to the Singularity, and its promise of immortality. (If you are in the back seats you might not get there in time. (It's a different type of digital divide.))]