Researchers create world's smallest, open source drone

Academics in the Netherlands claim they have designed and built the world’s smallest autopilot system for drones.

At four square centimetres, the open source Lisa/S chip (Lost Illusions Serendipitous Autopilot/Small) that the autopilot system runs off is roughly the same size as a €1 coin. Despite its small size, the 1.9g piece of silicon contains everything required to fly a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) without human interaction.

Project leader Bart Remes told Techworld that the biggest challenge with Lisa/S, which is 30 grams lighter than its predecessor, was getting everything to fit onto a 2x2 cm board.

  “The overall strategy of our MAV lab is to make everything small, light and electrically efficient,” said Remes. “If the autopilot is smaller and more efficient you can fly longer or carry more payload.”

The chip's software is based on Paparazzi, a free open source drone autopilot system that's existed since 2003 and is available to everyone.

Remes said he chose to make Lisa/S open source because he wants MAVs to become as popular as mobile phones. “The best way to achieve this is making it available for the public so they can come up with the killer application,” he said in reference to the decision.

“Now the community can test it in much more test environments than we can do here in the lab,” said Remes. “They let us know when an issue arises and help us to solve it.  Thanks to the community the open source autopilots are safer than closed source autopilots.”

Drones have traditionally been largely confined to the military but the team hopes that civil drone applications will become more common and used in everything from agriculture to search and rescue.

“More and more farmers are using drones for monitoring their crops,” said Remes. “It is a way to save money because they only spray fertiliser on the crops that need it, by looking at the data coming from the drone's multi spectrum camera.”

The Lisa/S will compete in the International MAV competition next month.

Review: Create your own audible biography with StoryPress for iPad

If you’ve ever had a hankerin’ to sit down and craft your own biography—or to collect the stories of your parents or grandparents before they pass on—StoryPress, a free iPad app from GhostGear Labs, is just the place to start. It helps you record oral histories that sound nearly as polished and professional as the Story Corps pieces you sometimes hear on NPR.

After you log in with an email address or your Facebook account, StoryPress wants you to jump right into the creative process. You’ll enter your name, the year of your birth, and then create a cover for your first book. (Despite the conceit that you’re creating a book in StoryPress, there’s very little text involved: You’ll be recording your memories, not typing them out.) The cover includes the title, an icon from a list provided by StoryPress, and a photo from your iPad library.

Your next prompt is to select a method to record your tale. Select “Dictation” if you already know precisely the story you want to tell—just tap a button in the app and start recording while you talk. Most of us, though, will want to use the second option—“Interview Me”—which gives you a choice of more than a dozen categories, each featuring an interview template of roughly a dozen questions or more.

Don't know where to start with your bio? StoryPress will interview you. I chose the “Childhood” category, which offered nearly two-dozen questions. The questions—and, often, a few secondary questions—appear on the screen. You push a button to begin recording and answer the question, or can skip the question entirely if you don’t like. Depending on how much of a storyteller you are, this can be an arduous process: Luckily, there’s an option to pause the questioning and come back later, which is particularly useful if you want to get down into detail.

Once done, you’ll upload the finished book to StoryPress.com, choosing to do so either in private or public mode. Both modes let you share your story with friends and family via Twitter, Facebook, or email—friends are directed to StoryPress’s website to listen. If you save a story publically, it becomes part of StoryPress’s social network of folks who trade stories about the good old days.

Both public and private modes let you share your story with friends, but public makes it available to the StoryPress community. StoryPress allows you to create and upload five books for free. After that, you’ll have to pay $49 a year for a premium account to create and store more of your oral histories. Be warned: It’s easy to run quickly through those first five credits. (I accidentally used two on the same book, uploading it first in private mode and then in public mode. Oops.)

Users would definitely benefit from a little more in-app guidance about how to use the complete StoryPress service. Upon first use, I uploaded my book in “private” mode, then couldn’t figure out how to share it with friends until I went to StoryPress’s website. (You can, however, go to the website within the app.)

This is a good app. It is easy to use, and has crystal clear recording—but there are some items on my wish list for future editions of StoryPress. Oral histories can be rich, but it would nicer if there were more visual elements at play: The ability to add more photos of an event being described, at the very least, or perhaps the ability record video interviews. 

Microsoft reorg could fix some problems, create others

Steve Ballmer’s grand plan to reinvent Microsoft has garnered mixed reviews from industry analysts, ranging from enthusiastic endorsements to frowning skepticism.

Some predict the reorganization will accomplish its goal of making Microsoft more efficient and innovative, and thus better able to compete against rivals like Apple, Oracle, IBM and Google. Others are concerned that internal accountability will drop and the company will become less responsive to customer needs and market inflections.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

At the heart of the restructuring, announced Thursday, is the dissolution of the company’s five business units—the Business Division, which housed Office; Server & Tools, which included SQL Server and System Center; the Windows Division; Online Services, which included Bing; and Entertainment and Devices, whose main product was the Xbox console.

They’re being replaced by four engineering groups organized by function, around operating systems, applications, cloud computing and devices, and by centralized groups for marketing, business development, strategy and research, finance, human resources, legal and operations.

Ballmer wants the company to operate more cohesively, so it can build blockbuster products that cater to the needs of people both at home and at work in a variety of ways.

“The form of delivery of our value will shift to really thinking about devices and services versus packaged software,” Ballmer said during a press conference Thursday.

“We need to move forward as one Microsoft, with one strategy and one set of goals,” he added.

Teams will work in an interdisciplinary fashion on all major projects to make sure efforts are in sync with the overall goals of the company, according to Ballmer.

Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, is skeptical of this shift from business units to functional groups.

“The business of business is business. Companies should be organized by major business units, not by functional units,” he said.

With this new setup, it may become harder for outsiders such as customers, partners, investors and analysts to decipher Microsoft’s strategy and evaluate its performance, he said. In short, he fears there will be less transparency and visibility into the company.

“I would have preferred that there was a clear message they were going to continue to manage and report by business. Whether they structure [the company] that way or not is less material,” Austin said.

“The value of transparency is that it lets customers and investors make more informed decisions as to the level of accuracy or spin that are in Microsoft’s executive statements,” he added.

IDC analyst Al Gillen views the plan with more optimism, saying Microsoft is making necessary, bold changes.

“Microsoft’s core business is being undermined by changes in the market and the company needs to be more responsive and think about things differently than it has in the past,” he said.

Among the main challenges Microsoft faces are the weak position of Windows in smartphones and tablets, where it lags far behind Android and iOS, and the increased competition against Office from rivals like Google that offer less expensive, cloud-hosted alternatives.

Microsoft has responded to those threats with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, and with Office 365, a suite that includes cloud-delivered versions of its productivity apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Web-hosted versions of its server products like SharePoint, Lync and Exchange.

However, Windows 8 and its version for ARM devices, Windows RT, launched in October, weren’t well-received, prompting Microsoft to prep an update called Windows 8.1 that will be released this year. Meanwhile, Office 365 continues to battle Google Apps and other competing communication and collaboration suites. For example, Microsoft spent US$1.2 billion a year ago to buy Yammer and boost SharePoint’s enterprise social networking capabilities.

The four new engineering teams are the Operating Systems Engineering Group, led by Terry Myerson; the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, led by Julie Larson-Green; the Applications and Services Engineering Group, led by Qi Lu; and the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group, led by Satya Nadella.

“We’ll pull together into fewer core engineering groups, and we’ll pull together all the other functions and disciplines under leaders that work for me directly,” Ballmer said.

The Operating Systems Engineering Group will focus on Windows development for gaming consoles, mobile devices, PCs and back-end server systems, including OS cloud services. With this realignment, Microsoft is seeking a unified, common Windows presence and experience across those devices and systems, which it doesn’t have today and which enterprise customers especially could find compelling.

“It’s important and a positive move to integrate all operating system development into a single team,” Gillen said.

At the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, Larson-Green, until now one of the two Windows OS chiefs, will focus on all hardware development and their supply chain strategy. This group will also be in charge of “studios experiences” including games, music, video and other entertainment. Microsoft seems interested in boosting its efforts to build its own hardware, building on its experience developing the Xbox console and the Surface tablets, thus mimicking to an extent Apple’s successful model.

The Applications and Services Engineering Group will be in charge of applications and services technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories. It will be interesting to see how the realignment works in this group, since the Office stack and the consumer online services had traditionally belonged to separate groups.

However, with Office 365, those lines are blurring, in particular with the recent decision to mesh Skype, which is primarily a consumer IM and VoIP service, with its enterprise equivalent, Lync. In the press conference, Qi Lu said that whether it’s Bing, Office or Skype, Microsoft applications are all about helping people complete tasks and get work done.

Meanwhile, the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group will be in charge of back-end technologies, including technologies for data centers, databases and enterprise IT systems and development tools. Its leader, Nadella, had been in charge of the Servers and Tools group, which had been performing well financially. A focus for this group will continue to be the company’s Azure cloud platform.

The Dynamics enterprise software products will continue to operate separately under Kirill Tatarinov, but report to Lu, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner and Tami Reller, the other former Windows chief who will now head the Marketing Group. As part of the plan, Craig Mundie will work on a “special project” until the end of this calendar year, and assume a consultant role starting in 2014. Office chief Kurt Del Bene resigned from the company Wednesday, though his official last day will be Dec. 31.

Michael Osterman, from Osterman Research, views as positive the shift away from product-centric, siloed teams to a more unified approach that is focused on what customers need from devices and services.

“This is a good thing,” he said. “They need to realign the company to be more responsive to customers.”

The reorganization may yield a sharper marketing focus and strategy, an area where Microsoft has at times been weak, Osterman said.

Frank Gillett, a Forrester Research analyst, concurs. “This demonstrates a commitment to build an integrated, coherent Microsoft experience. It wasn’t incoherent before, but it also wasn’t well-coordinated,” Gillett said.

What’s not clear to Gillett is how exactly this will be carried out, and he foresees it being a major endeavor. “I’m not seeing an overall head of products. That concerns me,” he said.

Others view the “One Microsoft” effort with skepticism, especially if it results in a doubling-down on what critics call the “Microsoft first” strategy, which they blame for Microsoft’s reluctance, for example, to fully port Office to other operating systems like iOS and Android despite massive demand, in order to give Windows a competitive advantage.

“[One Microsoft] should do wonders for CIOs who are all in for Microsoft, but it should strike fear in the heart of CIOs who were hoping that Microsoft would decouple Office from Windows,” Austin said.

Over the years, Microsoft critics have suggested the company’s product lines are too diverse, and that certain businesses should be spun off as autonomous subsidiaries or even independent companies. Clearly, Ballmer has taken the opposite tack.

The implementation of the plan should take at least three months, maybe more, said Gillen, who considers this the company’s biggest reorganization ever. Microsoft will need to continue tweaking the plan in the coming years based on market changes.

“Is this the only and last thing they’ll have to do? No. They’ll have to continue responding to changes in the industry, and they’ll have to continue adjusting the organizational structure,” he said.

Or as Gillett put it: “They needed to do something and they’re making big changes that make sense. Now we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.”