computers should be less friendly

I want a Life Hub.  Don’t worry I still want a phone/PDA, iPod, camera and computer.  I’m one of those people that believes a device that does “everything” doesn’t do any of them particularly well.  I want something that I can carry around that plugs me into my or your devices and shares my data with them.

When I sit in my car, I want my Life Hub to connect up to my music interface device which connects to my car so the controls are mapped to the steering wheel and the music comes out the speakers.

When I go to the office, I want my Life Hub to connect to my work phone and register my cell number so my work phone will ring with calls placed to my cell phone.

When I take a picture with my camera, I want it saved on my Life Hub.  I want to be able to browse those pictures on my smart phone and email them to my friends.  Kind of like Dave’s social camera.  If I so chose my Life Hub can broadcast to others the picture I just took, without or without the tagging my camera added.

Why do I need 97 different syncing programs to get my Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal Calendar to line up!  Aren’t these just visualizations of the same data set?  If I had my calendar on my Life Hub, I could just access it from there.  Who cares where I’m sitting, at my home machine, work machine or at the Library.

So, what is a Life Hub, basically a high capacity solid state memory drive ( Intel is looking to get up to 160GB in the next few years ) with a very high bandwidth wireless connection.  It has a UI that lets you “allow” devices to connect for a period of time and access certain types of data on your Life Hub, read and/or write.  The idea is that this thing should eventually be small enough to fit on a key chain, think thumb drive on crack — in reality it could be your key chain!  Ever seen someone unlock and start their Prius without taking a key out?

If it had strong encryption you could store your X-Rays and patient files on the drive.  What if you could allow your doctor to review a certain set of them for a period then when they are done zap the records back to you?  Why should Microsoft control your health records, or even Google for that matter?  Today Adobe PDFs can be locked so they are only viewed for a period of time.

Is all this possible today?  Some of it — some of it is also hard, standardizing the wireless protocol for instance.  Currently, there is no wireless standard that rivals Firewire for throughput sending a RAW image from today’s DSLR cameras, BlueTooth just won’t do.

I have no idea how to solve these problems or “the chicken and the egg problem” of this only being useful if there are devices out there that can connect to it.  I do know that I want one.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Life Hub, innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.