Design & Innovation

It’s time for me to rant and rave about a design problem that has persisted and even gotten worse over my lifetime: CORD OVERLOAD! As the eerie photos from my apartment demonstrate, connecting our plethora of peripherals to each other and to electrical power can only be accomplished by a near-endless series of wires, connectors, adaptors and cords. It’s unsightly, confusing and a huge pain point, even for the most techno-savvy users.

Problem: Too Many Cords
Everything needs a cord. My DVD player needs to connect to my TV, but so does my VCR (yes, I’m old-school) and my cable box and my stereo. The stereo has two satellite speakers and an external FM antenna (yes, it’s another cord :). All of them need to be plugged into AC power. My computer has five speakers, each of which require their own cord. Add the monitor, mouse, keyboard, USB cable for my digital camera and my phone USB cable, my photo printer, my inkjet printer and my desk lamp. If you do the math, it turns out that wiring all of my TV-related components together and providing them with power requires 21 cords. That’s a lot. In fact, that’s too many!

Problem: Too Many Connections
So guess how many individual connections the 21 TV-related cords make? 41! My stereo has an FM antenna that plugs in only one time, hence 41 connections. That’s a lot of plugging. I am pretty good at getting the connections right, but I know a lot of people who wouldn’t even attempt to set up a new TV on their own.

So what’s the solution? Obviously, wireless technologies like Bluetooth may soon eliminate the need for peripheral connections. But what about AC power? I did a quick search and was amazed to find a product that provides wireless AC for up to 300 feet. But the joke was on me! It was just an April Fool’s joke played by ThinkGeek.com. So yeah, no hope there yet.

As for the connection problem, I have seen some encouraging steps from (of course) Apple. I was using a friend’s Mac the other day and was “delighted” to discover that the power cord was magnetized to leap right into place. How awesome! Contrast that to the ultimate in bad cord design (duh duh duh)… the COAXIAL CABLE! I may work for Comcast, but that doesn’t mean I approve of our most beloved cord. I mean, it even looks like a monster or a torture device from A Clockwork Orange. It’s absolutely the most heinous thing to use, and to my knowledge, it’s always been that way.

Thus ends my design-inspired rant. Keep me posted if anyone has great solutions to this problem.

One of the interesting things mentioned by Mark from Yahoo during our tour is the next generation of wireless technology soon to hit the market. This new technology is known as 4G for “fourth generation” wireless and will come in two versions: WiMAX and LTE. LTE or Long Term Evolution looks to be the favorite in the space and has been selected by Verizon as their network of the future.

One of the leading manufactures of network devices and infrastructure in the LTE space is Nokia. This article talks a little bit about a real world test Nokia recently conducted for LTE: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071228-nokia-4g-wireless-tech-hits-173mbps-in-real-world-test.html

It will be interesting to see all of the new services and features that will be created for this technology. LTE will be so fast that it will feel like the user is connected to a wired network. With such bandwidth available to our mobiles we can have services based on location, stream live video to and from our phones and run many other new and innovative applications in real time. Some of the next great applications that we use in our everyday lives may be designed for the 4G mobile devices.