Entrepreneur & Technologist

Category: startups

Android Power and Battery Management: A Look Underneath The Hood

When it comes to mobility, battery life is a paramount concern and a key selling feature for mobile phone manufacturers. Tech giants such as Google and Apple spend a significant amount of time to fully optimize and improve battery life and performance characteristics of their mobile devices. Recent concerns about iOS11’s hunger for power consumption indicates a 60% higher battery decay rate causing many to hold off updating to the latest iOS version which could potentially cause significant business and brand damage to a Apple. While batteries are getting better, demand for power is also increasing with the proliferation and ubiquity of services available on smartphones.

Storytelling in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Excerpts from this post appeared on this Huffington Post piece. 

Software was eating the world. Then came AI.

Can you remember the last time you sat in on a panel discussion about technology without hearing the words “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”? Reminiscent of big data in 2007, the ubiquity of AI in 2017 is profoundly impacting the world. Unlike big data, which predominantly focused on the enterprise sector, rapid advances in AI and machine learning are directly affecting end consumers in a much more tangible fashion. In only a few years, we went from smart phones and smart TVs to AI-powered shoes, strollers, luggage and bags, doors, trucks, burger flipping robots, and even more recently, Microsoft’s audacious attempt to push AI into single board computing devices the size of a red-pepper flake.

State of LA Startups

Starting a high tech startup 5 years ago in Los Angeles would be nothing like how it is in 2013. Los Angeles is finally earning the credit it deserves in being one of the world’s fastest growing startup communities. Events like LA Tech Summit with almost 1000 attendees are testaments to this movement. I feel lucky to have co-founded Tilofy in LA this year where we are surrounded by a vibrant community to help us succeed. Team Tilofy was featured along with thought leaders like Michael Abbott from Kleiner Perkins in a short video about the role of startups in creating a vibrant economy in Los Angeles.

Tech Startups & the LA Economy from USC Viterbi on Vimeo.

Starting a New Chapter

Peek Into The Future

Tilofy – Peek Into The Future

Around 10 years ago I came to the states to pursue my dreams. I spent the first two years as a masters student in George Washington University and the next five getting my PhD at University of Southern California. To me, it wasn’t about buying a nice car, living in a nice house or eating at the most expensive restaurants. In a world that has given us Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs there are many more satisfying dreams to live for and get inspired by. Throughout these years, I had the blessing of working with some of the smartest people I have seen in my life at USC, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Samsung. People who empowered me, inspired me to dream, and supported my professional growth. I am indebted to them all.

Today was my last day as a senior technologist in Samsung Electronics R&D and hopefully my last day ever as an employee. I co-founded Tilofy for a dream. To give users a faster and easier way of discovering time and location-sensitive information on their mobile devices. My new journey has begun and I am already humbled by family, friends and colleagues supporting this effort. I wake up everyday with a dream of becoming the next agent of change through my entrepreneurial journey. To reach a point that enables me to have a positive effect on the lives of millions of people all around the world, through technology, philanthropy or hopefully both.

State of Social Media in 2012; Welcome to the jungle!

So Instagram is no longer cool enough and is getting outdated? His founder’s girlfriend gives you Lovestagram.

social media tools

Social media fragmentation

Have a cool picture of your last night’s lavish meal that you want to share? How about uploading it to path or twitting about it, or maybe posting it on facebook? You can also cheers to it and have your friends cheer at your cheers. Btw, did I mention Google plus, yelp, foursquare, Pinterest and Tumblr? And the list goes on with almost every month one or two new social apps popping up each trying to finding innovative ways to lure users into dragging them to their phones’ home screen and push the other guys to that third page to fight with their peers for retention.

But it shouldn’t be like that. And hopefully it won’t. To me the painful process of checking in at the restaurant using app A, taking a picture of your dish and uploading it to a social app B, and writing a short message about it on app C and tagging your friends in app D… is too much to worry about for users and does not scale. There are currently two alternatives to this problem. One is to totally ignore all of these apps and remain loyal to one (or a select few). The second solution is to link them all together and post to one allowing others to obliviously replicate your post. However, neither solution is optimal. The former locks you and your data in, is too restrictive, makes it more painful to migrate to new and better apps/experiences and shrinks your social media influence. The latter, while being less problematic, is not useful either as it totally ignores the “context” of each app, it’s “language”, the features specific to the target platform and finally its user expectations (yes, not everyone in the world is on twitter and familiar with a 140 character cryptic looking messages that appear on someone’s facebook timeline. Ask those who don’t use twitter). This paradigm will soon have to shift into a less painful alternative for users or apps start eating away each other at a rate that none can get even a fraction of facebook or twitter’s user base, influence or attention.

Social media fragmentation

Social media fragmentation

I use the following analogy to describe a departure from the current fragmented state of social media content generation and consumption. For a second imagine if you had to capture a new picture each time one of your users told you they were using a new image viewer application on their desktops/phones. You would have to take a different version of each picture for every single image viewer out there. However, thanks to the power of standards and the operating system, you create a picture [content] once without having to worry which or how many applications [views] will “render” your file. While this is not a very fair example due to its simplicity, it highlights the deep gap between a full separation of content and views and our current status.

While as Fred Wilson points out it is too simplistic to think about social media consolidation around a winner-takes all social platform, it is not that farfetched to think about a world where each social media outlet acts as a “view” over your singular and central “content”. This way, users generate a “multi-modal and multi-dimensional information element” that consists of any number of attributes such as name, description, location, time, image, video, etc. only once and allow a selected list of social applications to “interpret” and “translate” its content into a “language” or “form” popular in the destination platform. This way, the description of your social experience [how] of eating a fabulous Burger [what] at the awesome Father’s Office in Culver City [where] with Mary and Jane [who] along with the “video” or “image” of the burger [augmented modalities] form a single multi-dimensional multi-modal data element that can be (semi-)automatically transformed into a tweet, facebook post, youtube video, instagram picture, foursquare checkin, cheers to post, path update, and so on. With all information silos consolidating, location services becoming ubiquitous and facebook becoming everyone’s digital web identity we’re not that far. It’s a matter of solving a few (but very challenging) privacy, security & legal, UX and of course business issues. But these to entrepreneurs are hopefully what smells like teen spirit sounded like to teenagers of Seattle in 1991.

Images courtesy of The Conversation PrismPixeljointhardindd.

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