Category: general

For some reason, Noel (@noelportugal) posted a picture of his IoT gadget inventory. Click to embiggen.

So, I got some home automation for Christmas, a Nest Thermostat and a Roomba. How about you? Nest Thermostat I’ve been eagerly following the Nest since its inception, and I finally pulled the trigger, right before Google bought them. I’m not entirely sure why I liked the hockey puck so much. It’s a beautiful little… Read More

Lots of news coming out of Applications UX lately, so thought I’d share it here. Over at Misha’s (@mishavaughan) Voice of User Experience blog, you can read about Simplified UI for Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud and Simplified UI for Oracle Sales Cloud. Both versions went live in September when Oracle Cloud Applications, Release 7 was… Read More

I’m cleaning up all the open tabs for the holidays, so here are some nuggets I found that may or may not be interesting. Enjoy. Turkey Tweeter Hinkmond Wong of the Java Embedded Technology team did a fun Thanksgiving project, a Turkey that tweets as it cooks. It’s time for the Internet of Things (ioT)… Read More

Since Google announced the Chromecast earlier this year, I’ve been stoked to see how it developed. The little device has a ton of potential, and even though Google has been a little slow to push its adoption, even slowing down the efforts of some curious developers, they do seem committed to the device. I preordered… Read More

The holiday season is in full swing now, and I’ll bet a lot of people out there will be getting some form of wearable device as a gift. Wearables is a pretty broad category, that seems to be right at the cusp of mainstream adoption. For now, it includes smartwatches, augmented reality on your face,… Read More

Our new team members, Raymond and Tony, have been busy in their short time with us, and they’re embracing the AppsLab way. What way is that you ask? Since the beginning, we’ve always started with an idea and moved quickly to build something conceptual to see how and if the idea works. Connect began life… Read More

A while back, I promised some details on the Google Now TV Card I found accidentally. I was watching TV via an HDTV antenna and happened to pop open Google Now for some reason or another. Now showed me this card: Freaky, right? I dismissed it, but my curiosity was peaked. So, I did some… Read More

Did you know that Paul (@ppedrazzi) and his lovely wife and children were on Shark Tank? If you hurry, you can watch their episode on Hulu. If you decide to wait, they appear in Season 5 Episode 10. Paul and family are the very first segment, so you won’t have to watch the entire episode,… Read More

Busy times lately here at the ‘Lab. We’ve grown from a small band of three to six in the past six weeks. Joining our happy little crew are Osvaldo, whom we were lucky to find on our adventure to Mexico, Raymond, a friend of Anthony’s from Taleo, and Tony, whom I’ve known for many years.… Read More

I love a good pun. This way off-topic, even for me, but I can’t pass up not one, but two Sriracha stories. As background, this is Sriracha, beloved by The Oatmeal and multitudes of others, including yours truly. Dare I call it “the Cadillac of hot sauces.” First, there’s a profile of David Tran, h/t… Read More

I like Google Now, and although it’s not a fixture in my daily device life, I it use pretty often, and it just keeps getting smarter and more useful. Case in point, a couple weeks ago, I got my first Activity summary card, or at least, I noticed it for the first time. Pretty interesting… Read More

For the nostalgic readers out there, I found the install disks for Windows NT 4.0 in my desk last week. I thought it would be fun to spin up a VM for old time’s sake, but that idea will take some doing. Stay tuned. If nothing else, I’ll keep these as a history lesson to… Read More

Traveling a lot lately, which means I’ve had time to sit and observe people in airports. In today’s world, this is a great research opportunity for mobile devices. I’m a huge fan of anecdotal evidence, and I like to watch users in the wild to see what devices they use. Numbers can tell you a… Read More

This is just plain awesome. From kotte.org: Steven Hawking came up with a simple and clever way of seeing if time travel is possible. On June 28, 2009, he threw a party for time travellers from the future…but didn’t advertise it until after the party was already over. Usually, I’d be all over this type of story,… Read More

For some reason, I’m reminded of a lottery commercial that ran in my hometown in the 80s. The refrain was “Look, there goes another winner,” over and over; I guess the subliminal messaging has attached itself to other things in my mind. Anyway, been busy lately, so here’s a recap of some stuff that I’ve… Read More

Even though sailing isn’t my thing, it was impossible to avoid getting swept up by last week’s boat race. Possibly lost in all the drama is the amount of technology these boats and race teams use to help them win. Check out this video that highlights all the technology out on the water and how… Read More

In the midst of preparing for Oracle OpenWorld, I have spent couple hours building a micro app for our marketing team to keep attendees up-to-date with the latest OOW news and announcements.  You may head up to http://oow2013.appspot.com to start using it if you have Glass. I look forward for a fun and exciting week starting today.  You… Read More

You may have 99 problems, but finding a contest to show off your coding chops during Oracle OpenWorld won’t be one of them. You’ll have two from which to choose, the Oracle Fusion Cloud Developer Challenge or the Applications Express Developer Challenge. Or hey, why not do both? I guess because of our challenge exploits last year, Noel (@noelportugal)… Read More