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Woz's New Startup
Several readers noted that Woz has a startup called Wheels of Zeus. He's come out of "Semi Retirement"
to work on a new wireless handheld sort of thing. Not a lot of details,
but it certainly could shape up to be interesting. Specifically
mentions GPS. Supposedly Woz.com
will have data eventually, but currently is just really slow
and redirecting to Woz's personal page.
Finally one of the great minds is back in action. I wonder if this new project will be contributed to by apple?
ender-iii
For the love of God,
PLEASE INNOVATE!!! Don't do the standard all in one hand held, do something unique...well hell, something Woz like even
Sent from your iPad.
You don't turn the device on, you power it up by saying, "WOZ up."
You don't find your scheduler, you say, "WOZ happening."
The reason you can't find anything at the website woz.com is because you didn't say, "WOZ it do?"
WOZ, I'm not funny today? WOZ the matter? WOZ wrong with you?
Cool, Now Apple Can Compete With Dell!
I can just imagine Steve Wozniak on TV in an elf costume as he shouts, "Dude, you're gettin' an Apple!"
Hmmm, OK, maybe not...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Maybe the special emphasis on GPS is to answer the question 'where is Woz nowadays?'. He just needs to carry one of the handhelds at all times.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Say, a watch that can help you navigate to the nearest pub? Maybe. Yet, this is The Woz. The guy who designed the Apple Computer. (Jobs is just a marketer, albeit a good one.) If anyone can come up with something truly new and cool, it's him.
Best Slashdot Co
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Does anyone remember Woz's last failed startup (at least the last one I heard about), which was also making wireless devices... these were big, complicated programmable remote controls.
The company was called CL9... you can read about it here in google's cache (since his site is slashdotted at the moment).
The devices and company were a complete failure as I recall... I don't think he's done any notably successful product since the Apple ][, so I don't hold out high hopes for this new venture either.
The Apple alumni have always been a creative bunch, I'm interested to see what he has to contribute.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
The new company will not initially announce what products it is planning and Mr. Wozniak said this week it was likely that it would not at first market its own products. It will instead seek licensing and marketing arrangements with other consumer electronics and related companies.
appears that unlike the first Apples, Woz plans on licensing these things at first. proving he has at least learned something!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Hmm... Why Wheels Of Zeus?
Must be some babe killer device, that you pop into your babe magnet car. Using GPS, the device automatically points you to your next laison, while spitting out details like her name, what persona you used to get into her pants, any offspring you might have sired with her.
Not what I expected from Woz, but hey, it might be a big hit.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
A report in the New York Times on Wednesday said Wozniak would not immediately announce what products he is developing. A spokesman for the company was not immediately available to comment further.
If he's interested in hyping up his GPS doo-hickey, perhaps he should tell us what it is.
If he's interested in hyping his stock, he should hang out with Dubya.
Goat sex free since 2001
(The article can be found here. Excerpts follow.)
.... By driving down the cost of G.P.S. technology, the company says, it expects to help "everyday people track everyday things." ... It is the first start-up venture for Mr. Wozniak since he closed his previous company, Cloud 9, a maker of high-end consumer remote control devices, in 1988.
...
... It plans to have its first products finished sometime next year.
While Mr. Jobs went on to found Next Inc., bought Pixar (news/quote), and then returned to Apple as its chief executive in 1997, Mr. Wozniak, now 51, has largely remained on the sidelines. That has made him unusual in a hothouse business and technology culture that is characterized by serial entrepreneurs, few of them walking away after either success or failure. Instead, he has occupied himself with private investments and has taught computer education for elementary through high school students in the Los Gatos, Calif., school district, where he lives.
The new company will not initially announce what products it is planning and Mr. Wozniak said this week it was likely that it would not at first market its own products. It will instead seek licensing and marketing arrangements with other consumer electronics and related companies.
He said one goal was to take technologies that are now costly and reduce them in price so they could be sold in consumer markets.
Mr. Wozniak said he had enjoyed simply being a consumer of new technologies for more than a decade. But last year, a friend visited and began talking about an idea that used G.P.S. in a strange way and he found himself excited by the prospects of doing something with this.
"Sometimes I say that and I'm not really serious," he remarked, "but this time I was really serious."
...
Mr. Galanos said his firm had been excited about both the company's technology idea and the possibility of backing Mr. Wozniak.
"After all how many times will Steve jump on something new again?" he said.
Woz has done many creative things in life and will continue to do more.
(former member of the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club)
I'm sure slashdotting it will speed it up.
Milalwi
First you link to John Romero's home page and now Woz's?
I feel like I bought one of those cheap "Homes of the Stars" maps roadside in Hollywood.
A Seqway intregrated with Wireless PDA support with a Wireless Flight helmet heads up display for an outdoor wheeled version of Quake on a specially prepared field or arena.
The First Truely wireless sports experience.
Thus: "Wheels of Zeus"
The wireless pda could be used to facilitate score keeping, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As far as I'm concerned Woz is a real hero of high tech. He did some truly revolutionary tech that worked at a human scale, found a partner who had what was required to get it to the masses, kept his sence of houmor and then took his winnings to become a volunteer teaching. This is a true winner.
Thanks Woz from a slightly jaded 40 year old engineer
Woz specifically designed the original Apple(s) *not* to price themselves out of the market. It was the Mac that made Apple's name as a "boutique" computer seller, and that was when they really started overpricing their equipment. Woz was already gone, if not in absolute terms, at least in any practical ones.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Good luck to you, Woz!
The man is a brilliant engineer. And at making new technology cost-effective and so commercially realizable.
Whether that translates into a business windfall? Well, I just hope he's having fun and feeling creative. Technically, good things are bound to come of it.
I hope the interface (from physical to graphic) is really useful.
And, if you expect me to read anything significant off of it, I hope the display is decent.
When are we ever going to fix displays? We've got horsepower enough -- how about something easy on the eyes and with more than a piddly few lines?
Sorry, didn't mean to be harsh.. Was just trying to be informative .. and lighten the seriousness and stuff..
:-)
BTW: Let's end this post..
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I remember reading in an interview with Douglas Adams that one thing he wanted to do was a PDA+GPS+wireless(possibly) and then use it as a Hitch Hikers Guide to Earth. That was one of the ideas behind the H2G2 project.
;-)
That idea always appealed to me. It would be very nice to be able to leave small virtual GPS caches around for other people. And to get current information about any place in the world.
You really wouldn't need all that frequent updates, stopping by at an internet cafe once a week or so would do it easily. (Could be problematic if you're visiting California though.
A few weeks ago, Woz was named to the board of Danger, Inc, which seems to be a totally separate entity from Wheels of Zeus.
Since both companies are interested in producing whiz-bang handhelds, isn't him being on the board of one company and having his own, separate company some sort of raging conflict of interest?
~Philly
Screw Segway, have you seen the iBot? Now that looks like a seriously cool piece of technology! Check out the "balance function" video.
Woz was the genius behind the Apple ][ - but was he behind the Mac? It's the Mac that really launched Apple, not their old line which weren't any more or less revolutionary than the competition at teh time (ie, the Compaq and IBM PCs, as well as the Pc Jr). Remember folks - Apple computers had command-line interfaces!
I don't think that Woz will be the Wireless Messiah. There's no guarantee of success, especially since he has spent the past few decades out of the loop.
IMHO, his name lends his cachet only because of association to Apple, and Apple brings cachet only because of Jobs
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
I wonder if he had to purchase that domain from someone, or if it expired, etc.
What?
You know what, when I first heard about the Segway, I was under the impression it was going to be something more like iBot (perhaps I just heard two accounts of information and combined them.) iBot seems more impressive to me, I think I remember seeing something on PBS about it now that you mention it.
What?
World Otter eZtablishment
Excuse me?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
My favorite story about Woz:
He was always a fan of interesting numbers, people who had addresses like 1234 Main Street. For a long time he wanted a phone number with all ten (or at least seven) digits the same, but couldn't get one. Finally when the 888 toll-free area code came out, he was able to get a cell phone with the number (888)888-8888.
Soon thereafter, he began getting mysterious calls on his new phone. The phone would ring and there would be just silence, or strange (but not particularly rude) noises. These happened several times a day. Eventually, in one of those calls, he heard a woman's voice: "What are you doing with that? Put that down." followed by the other end hanging up.
He figured out that it was babies who were calling him. If a baby or young child picks up the phone, one of the most likely numbers to dial is the same digit over and over. Kids were picking up the phone and mashing the 8 button constantly.
I read this in a Wired interview (doesn't seem to be online) which ended with the line, "...the babies of the world were calling the Woz."
You silly people! *Wheels* of Zeus. GPS. Get it?? It's a Segway that drives itself!!! You program in your destination, and hang on for dear life.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
sarchasm
_______
2B1ASK1
And, of course, the Sysadmin will be called the Wizard.
Check out this company's products. They've already built it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We'll have a PDA/universal remote with awesome floppy controller drivers that can locate pay phones within 30 feet and allow it's user to make free calls by emitting a 2600Hz tone.
I own a PDA, a PCS phone, a TI-85 calculator, and a 2.1 Mpixel camera. I would like to have a portable MP3 player, GPS receiver, TV remote, and handheld computer (no, PalmOS doesn't quite cut it for general purpose software) as well. I am swamped with a multitude of electronic gadgets, with more to come, and yet my lowly mechanical engineering background leaves me unable to say why exactly these things can't all be done by the same device. By your use of the phrase "standard all in one hand held", I assume you know where I can find such a device. Please share this information. Thank you.
I didnt (intentionally) claim that the Apple ][ was competing directly against the other machines I listed. I said the Apple line was competing against them.
The buzz about Woz is misplaced IMHO because it was the Mac which really launched Apple as a Serious Contender in the consumer market, to really challenge {IBM|Compaq|etc} - the Apple I and ][ for all their whiz-bangery were still in the infant days of computing where only the elite had them.
Woz had nothing much to do with the Mac - which was a quantum leap ahead of the old Apple line. Yet teh buzz in the media seems to imply association where there isnt any.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com