The Update: Focus, 5g Space Phones, and Ghost Typewriters

Keeping an active internal discussion about the things that interest us at Geocene builds trust and makes it easier to have conversations about harder topics. I summarize our most interesting internal discussions for this newsletter, so you can be a part of our community too. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

• MedTech Intelligence just published an article I wrote about our work with Vena Vitals.

• One highlighted point in that article is focus. Along those lines, I asked Jonathan Stark to review Geocene’s own website. A clear takeaway was, perhaps ironically, “Geocene needs to focus.” I guess “focus” is one of those pieces of advice that is so much easier to give than to take. We’re thinking of changing our tagline from “Your IoT Engineering Partner” to something like “We engineer low-power connected devices and performant backends for IoT sensors.” Wordier, but focused.

Ditcherville by Jonathan Stark, distributed under Creative Commons

• Space communications are getting hot! Huawei and Apple both have phones capable of talking to space available on the market today, and a couple of startups are launching new low earth orbit satellite networks that promise to talk 5g. We do a lot of work with satellite communications, it’ll be interesting to see if we’re using cellular modems to do it in a few years.

• Speaking of Apple, rumor is that like 2019, 2021, and 2022, they’re about to maybe actually finally be leaving Qualcomm and building their own 5g chip with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in.

• We often use Raspberry Pi hardware for prototyping, or at least, we used to in the good old days of hardware availability. They promise to have single units available soon. We’d hate to have to switch to a competitor (Skot is wondering if this SBC is best with Linux or RTOS) in order to build a GPT-3 powered ghost typewriter.

Arvind Sanjeev’s photo of a broken typewriter being upgraded to ghost typewriter