One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
One of the many joys of working in the Ndiyo/Camvine shed is the view from the window, looking westward towards Grantchester. It rained for much of today, but the sun came out in the evening.
Click for different sizes
That, at least, is the verdict of this post on The Inquirer.
The technology created by my pals over at DisplayLink is getting ever-increasing publicity, if the size of the Google Alerts landing in my inbox each morning are anything to go by! And this is all good stuff.
One of the things that inspired me, when we started DisplayLink, was a feeling that that this technology was inevitable. The speed of general-purpose data networks was increasing very much faster than the resolution of displays, or the capabiity of the human visual system, which is essentially a constant. At some point, we realised, there would be no need for dedicated video connections like DVI because general-purpose networks would be cheaper, more flexible, and fast enough. We started Ndiyo and DisplayLink because we worked out that with 100Mb/s ethernet and USB 2.0, they were already fast enough for almost everything.
With 1Gb/s ethernet and USB 3.0, they’ll be fast enough for pretty much anything. And the networking world won’t stop there.
This doesn’t mean that graphics cards will go away. Many people, especially games players, will still want them for performance reasons. But you won’t need them for electrical reasons - to drive a particular type of signal over a particular kind of connector. VGA and DVI will go the way of the Centronics printer port. So graphics cards, whether standalone or built in to the motherboard, will become optional.
One of the things that excites me most about this is the fact that almost any device with a processor will soon be able to display a user interface on a decent-sized screen, if you care to plug one in. If you’re frustrated by the limitations of the user interface on your answerphone, your photocopier, your home alarm system, you’ll be able to plug in a 15″ or 17″ LCD and get a more sophisticated version. It makes sense because the manufacturer of the device concerned won’t have to build in a graphics chip, a framebuffer, or a VGA connector.
I started playing with this kind of thing when I worked on the VNC project at ORL/AT&T. It’s great to see the DisplayLink guys making it a reality.
I was invited to give a talk on Ndiyo, CamVine and DisplayLink at IBM Hursley yesterday. It was a first for me - I hadn’t been there before - but it must be a nice spot to work.
Just outside a picturesque Hampshire village you turn off the road and go up a long drive through beautiful grounds to the campus. It’s centred around a magnificent 18th-century house, and though this is rather dwarfed now by the extensive modern buildings which are home to the nearly three thousand IBM employees there, it must be very pleasant to stroll through the gardens at lunchtime. And I doubt many other technology campuses have their own cricket pitch.
It was also the first time I’ve given a technology talk in a former ballroom! I met some great people and had good discussions. But we stopped short of dancing.
One of the pictures that didn’t get used in the recent Guardian article:
Many thanks to John Robertson, who owns the copyright, for permission to post it.
There’s an article about Ndiyo in the Technology section of today’s Guardian.
It’s not bad - a few mistakes, but no more than the typical column. My main concern is that it sounds as if I did everything singlehandedly! Apologies to everybody else!
Update: Some have asked about the fact that I recently mentioned a photographer coming round, and then all that appeared in the article was a picture of coffee beans. This would have been entirely justified on aesthetic grounds, but in fact they did use a picture of me in the paper edition.
Michael and I got a couple of new toys for the Ndiyo office. We took them out of the box and plugged them in, ran some of our experimental software, and they just worked.
So we decided to point a camcorder at them and make a little movie…
We’re biased, of course, but we think this is quite cool.
Last month I was invited to give a talk about our work at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand.
The video of the full talk is now available in various formats from the Ndiyo site, in case you’re interested!
Ah, well, I might as well embed it here too… such is the magic of the web…
It’s an exciting time at Cambridge Visual Networks because we’re just starting to get orders from real customers.
CamVine, as we often abbreviate it, is a new company which we’ve set up to develop some of the ideas generated around Ndiyo. We’ve been working on it since the start of the year, but it’s only been officially incorporated for about a month, so it’s very encouraging to get sales, however modest, this early on…
Watch this space…!
I’ll be in San Francisco next week giving a talk about Ndiyo at the O’Reilly eTel Conference. Should be fun. I greatly enjoyed eTel last year…
There was some good stuff in Mohammad Yunus’s Nobel Lecture. I’ve posted a short extract on the Ndiyo Blog.
I’ve posted a picture of the innards of the next Ndiyo Nivo on the Ndiyo blog.
Some good press coverage this week for some projects close to my heart: