• Wireless interoperability and remote management

There’s currently a lot of approaches for wireless streaming inside the home. There’s DLNA, there’s Airplay, there’s WiDi and there’s a host of proprietary company specific approaches. Some companies presented simple solutions just to get old devices into the connected world. A good example is Skifta from Qualcomm Atheros, basically a small wifi box with audio out. You control the thing with a mobile app.

• Android is the innovation platform

Android is everywhere and getting better every year as we go. At least I came to the conclusion the latest Android 4 phones on display have passed Apple in both form factor and specs. Android is clearly the leading innovation platform, the one where all the cool hardware and system software innovation takes place first. Both Apple and Microsoft are seriously trailing in that regard. Still, despite Google’s “Smart Home” talk where Android runs also inside your refrigerator it is still too early to say Google would end up being the interface in all devices in the future. What has been demoed on Android will work on other Linux based systems as well.

We started the second day with a PR with NETGEAR. Following the previous day’s announcement with Marvell, we wanted to highlight the impact of our work in high performance storage to actual devices on the market:

With the help of Tuxera, NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS Duo v2 and NV+ v2 products feature significantly faster back-up times and seamless user experience with portable storages.

While both Marvell and NETGEAR are key partners for us in the storage segment, Tuxera keeps on working with all the leading chipsets and their different platforms.

Another market we have been investing a lot at Tuxera is automotive infotainment. It is also clearly a growing area for CES. In the first day Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche gave one of the keynotes with the following observation of what’s going on:

Here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there are some people who view the automobile as an accessory to consumer electronics. Conversely, at the auto show in Detroit there are many people who view consumer electronics as mere trimmings for the car. Both points of view miss the point: as much as a smartphone can be far more than just a tool for communication, a smart car can be more than just a means of transportation. Precisely at the interfaces between communication and mobility, vast potential for innovation lies dormant, and we intend to tap it.

It looks like every second car will have a tablet-like dashboard in the near future — a sort of placeholder for your digital identity. NVIDIA had the top design wins on show like the Lambo pictured above…

Annual CES kicked off today. We started the day by getting out a great PR with Marvell. The story is about scalable storage and top performance:

At 129 megabytes per second, Marvell and Tuxera’s NAS solution offers the fastest 2 GHz NAS performance on the market.

Coming to CES is all about meeting with customer and partners. It is always great to see partners thrive. One company I’m very happy we’re doing close cooperation with is Rockchip. They also had a bold announcement:

More than 80 percent of the Chinese tablet market is currently supported by Rockchip – a percentage that would make them a virtual behemoth in North America, clearly entrenching the company as the market leader in that country while laying the foundation for expansion into Europe and North America.

SD Association has its member goodies on show. Nice booth, and a lot of cool technology. Toshiba had the previously demoed FlashAir on show and there was also a related PR from SDA on combining SD memory and wifi chip in the same physical card:

This standard is applicable to full size SD/SDHC/SDXC and microSD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards. It taps into a billions-strong SD standards market for which manufacturers can develop products and consumers can reliably use Wireless LAN applications.

For this vision to become mainstream there is a lot of work to be done in the software side. Something we at Tuxera are working on.

See more information:

• Tuxera Integrates NTFS, exFAT, FAT32 and HFS+ into Intel® Atom™ Solutions, MeeGo Linux
• Tuxera Launches Tuxera File System Suite, First to Combine NTFS, exFAT and HFS+ for Android
• Tuxera Extends exFAT and NTFS Support to QNX Neutrino RTOS
• Tuxera exFAT Now Available for Android and Linux
• Tuxera Becomes SD Association Member to Meet the Industry Needs in Data Portability
• Tuxera Signs Intellectual Property Agreement with Microsoft

On the left you have two USB ports and on the right a removable hard drive bay circled. You can plug any NTFS-formatted portable hard drive or USB stick full of high-definition movies into the USB ports and it is plug & play. The same goes for the hard drive bay: take your NTFS-formatted drive from your Windows box and it works seamlessly with the Syabas media tank without any additional drivers.

We think Syabas’ example shows where the market is going. With both disk and file sizes growing, NTFS is currently the best — and in increasing cases the only — format option if you want your storage media to work plug & play with all computers from PCs to Macs and Linuxes as well as the latest consumer electronic devices.

Computex Taipei is finally over and done for 2010. A great event, with a lot of interesting electronics. It is clear the current semiconductor hotspot is here. From NAS systems to set-top-boxes, from cameras to phones, everything is packed together in Taipei or the nearby cities. In connection with Computex we did a joint press release with Microsoft on Tuxera exFAT for Linux.

The scenery in Taipei is unique. A quick escape from Taipei101 to Meokong for an afternoon tea shows everything from modern high-tech architecture to unreachable rainforest jungle in less than an hour. While it was raining almost every day I found the climate pleasant: warm but not too hot. You could walk with a T-shirt around the clock.

Make you stuff work under, inside, or on top of MeeGo and you get your stuff deployed all over the place. Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too

This is good news for companies like Tuxera. We are ready to support data portability on any Linux-based mobile device, be it running Android or MeeGo. For example shooting 1080p video into the device’s flash card requires in practice a file system change from FAT32 to exFAT. Tuxera exFAT works inside Android and MeeGo to manage that change.

We decided CES is the right time to go public with our Windows CE work. The most common use case must be Windows CE powered set-top boxes and other consumer electronic devices with a USB plug. If I want to upload my videos and music from a portable NTFS-formatted hard drive into the box, it must read NTFS.

Another relevant market are cars, where Windows CE is gaining momentum. At CES, Microsoft had driven Fiats, Fords and Kias on their booth. Window CE is running the “infotainment” or entertainment systems in these cars. But what if I want plug in the car stereo my portable NTFS-formatted hard drive, which is full of MP3s? Yes, the system should read NTFS.

We are currently in IFA in Berlin – touted as the “Leading Business Event for Consumer Electronics and Home Appliance’s”. This is a huge exhibition where you can see everything from cutting-edge kitchen electronics to digital media. For us, it has been great to note we have created an impact building on the excellent foundation of our open source work. Seems that demand for file system compatibility is on the rise, and who are we to say no to that challenge…