Net Work
Alan Winstanley
This month’s Net Work brings you the latest topical news about technology and trends from
the world of the Internet and beyond.
A
sk an Amazon shopper
the checkout phase
I pressed the Smile
button in Firefox,
the Smile donation was triggered.
Readers might need
to double-check this
in their own browser. It costs nothing
to make a seamless
donation this way,
so if you are a regular Amazon shopper Google’s Glass for Enterprise is a micro heads-up display that
Amazon’s Smile
and have a charitable builds on earlier models.
Another service offered by Amazon.
cause in mind, why
Fast forward to today, and Google
co.uk, which is less well advertised,
not check if the charity has signed up
is Amazon Smile, where Amazon will
to Amazon Smile and activate this Glass is alive and kicking in the form
of a wearable enterprise version for
automatically donate a small portion
option on your account.
use in industry and commerce. The
(0.5%) of your eligible purchases to
Smart glass heads-up
fascinating Android-powered Glass Enyour chosen charity, at no extra cost to
Readers with long memories would
terprise has 3GB of memory and 32GB
yourself. The listed (UK) charities must
have to go all the way back to Net of Flash memory, dual-band Wi-Fi,
be registered with the Charities ComWork, October 2013 to find a story an 8MP camera, a 640 × 480 micro
mission and signed up to the Amazon
about Google Glass, an innovation that screen, a mono speaker, three nearSmile programme. I had no problem
brought hands-free data to users in the field beam-forming microphones, and
locating a smaller, less well-known
form of a tiny head-up display carried plenty more besides. Google Glass is
charity that I’ve adopted following a
on a spectacle frame.
finding new roles in logistics, producfamily event this year. Amazon says
Google Glass was a tiny projector tion, maintenance and medicine as a
it has donated nearly £11m ($14 m) to
fitted to one arm of special lens-free
way of presenting data and information
date in the UK alone, and nearly £230m
glasses, which sported a tiny acryl- to its wearers, leaving them hands-free
($315m) worldwide. So far, mine has
ic prism that acted as a micro screen to get on with their job. For example,
benefitted by the grand sum of 46p,
that users could focus on with their a repair technician could view mabut it’s a start!
operative eyeball. I wrote that Google chinery diagrams ‘on screen’ in real
The latest mobile Amazon ShopGlass would enable the wearer to check time without having to thumb through
ping apps for iOS and Android are
their phone through Bluetooth, access a manual or scroll through a laptop
Amazon Smile-aware, so simply
the web or connect to Wi-Fi, check or tablet. A YouTube walk-through
tap on ‘Amazon Smile’ within the
navigation directions on a display (https://youtu.be/5IK-zU51MU4) shows
Programmes & Features menu or Setor interact with the device’s built-in that when coupled with augmented
tings to enable it. Desktop PC users
camera. Sound was transmitted through
reality software, these devices could
can donate by shopping at smile.
a bone-conducting transducer. Perhaps assist humans with all manner of roles
amazon.co.uk (it’s important to start
consumers weren’t ready for this quan- in the future. A tantalising taster of
from this URL when shopping). A
tum leap in Internet paraphernalia, as how this might work is shown at:
Smile bookmark button can also be
the product quietly disappeared, but https://youtu.be/dVzfYDaWbZc
dragged onto the web browser menu
not before Google gleaned a lot of pracFor everyday Internet users who fancy
bar; I discovered once or twice that if
tical know-how from the project prior the idea of wearable smart glasses, there
I’d forgotten to enter smile.amazon.
to re-purposing it for industry.
are a few choices in this emerging market.
co.uk when starting out, then if during
Ray-Ban recently launched its first generation ‘Stories’ smart glasses in a variety
of classic Ray-Ban styles. Priced at £299,
they come in various colours as well as
polarised and graduated lenses (prescription lenses are also available), and
they connect via Bluetooth to an app
hosted on the wearer’s smartphone. The
Amazon Smile will donate 0.5% of eligible purchases to your choice of charity, at no extra
glasses are mainly intended to capture
cost to you. Note the ‘Smile’ bookmark button.
what the Amazon logo – often
seen on cartons that drop onto
our doorstep – means to them and
they invariably say, ‘it’s a smiley’.
However, Amazon’s strapline was
at one time, Everything from A to Z
and the ‘smile’ is actually an arrow
pointing from A to Z in the word
‘Amazon’. See the interesting timeline
of Amazon’s logo development at:
https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-amz
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Practical Electronics | December | 2021
may be enough to finally tempt some
TV stick-in-the-muds onboard, with
packages starting from £13 a month
(variable) for the 43-inch package,
with Netflix bundled in for 18 months.
There are reams of small print worth
digesting, and more details are at:
www.sky.com/glass
(Left) Ray-Ban’s Stories smart sunglasses connect to a Facebook app to record
images and video clips; (Right) The ‘Capture’ LED warns those close by that the RayBan glasses are recording.
photos, 30-second video clips or carry
audio from phone calls. Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses integrate tightly with
Facebook, via the Facebook View app.
Someone else’s spectacles secretly
recording you might feel a bit creepy,
and Facebook goes to some lengths to
highlight the privacy aspects of these
devices and remind wearers of their
responsibilities. Facebook’s over-simplified privacy policy covering these
devices is at: https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-fb
The policy flags up the tiny ‘capture’
LED that supposedly warns anyone in
the immediate vicinity that the glasses
are recording. However, if it’s under
bright sunlight (they are sunglasses
after all), the capture LED may not be
noticeable at all – as Facebook says,
‘[the capture LED is so] you won’t catch
anyone near you off guard.’ More details are at: https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-rb
As an alternative, audio brand Bose
offers their ‘Audio sunglasses’ with
built-in sound but none of the smart
gadgetry, see further details here:
https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-bose
Amazon.com is marketing its $250
second-generation Echo Frames Smart
Glasses (not yet available in the UK)
with microphones (but no cameras)
for use with Alexa, and they are also
available with prescription lenses.
Amazon’s blurb can’t resist having a
dig: ‘Designed to protect your privacy – Amazon is not in the business
of selling your personal information
to others. Microphones are designed
to respond to the voice of the person
wearing the frames and turn off with
the double-press of a button.’
Amazon also sells a few obscure brands
of smart glasses that include a camera,
such as ‘OHO 4K Ultra HD Water Resistance Video Sunglasses, Sports Action
Camera with Built-in Memory’.
now benefit from a new class of wearable technology. The Orcam MyEye
is a small scanner device that clips
magnetically onto the side of spectacles, and will OCR text and convert
it to speech. It’s demonstrated here:
https://youtu.be/bbEEmc0xtvw
This technology is eye-wateringly
expensive though: the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) website
lists MyEye at £3,500 + VAT. A lower-cost, handheld device is the Orcam
Read, which has laser guides designed
to help with reading. It may appeal to
those with dyslexia or anyone whose
eyeballs and brain are simply suffering from ‘reading fatigue’. Street prices
are around £1,500. More details are at:
orcam.com
Aibo – not such a good boy?
As wearable technology continues to
improve and costs fall, smart glasses
with built-in cameras will eventually
become more commonplace. Privacy
infringement is likely to become a concern too, and some smart devices have
already fallen foul of privacy regulations, including Sony’s $3,000 Aibo
robot dog. The sensor-packed pooch
cleverly uses facial recognition to train
it to behave differently around familiar people, which was enough to cause
the state of Illinois to ban the purchase
or use of Aibo by its residents, citing
infringement of the state’s Biometric
Information Privacy Act.
Sky without its sky-based signal
Taxing times
One of the claims commonly voiced
today is that tech corporations such as
Amazon, Facebook, Google and eBay
should somehow ‘pay more tax’, as they
are often criticised for paying minimal
tax on the billions of dollars’ worth of
trade they generate in any particular
country. It’s a reasonable point to make,
and after an initial outcry, these firms
now ‘book’ sales more ethically (in
our case, to UK-sourced trade, rather
than shifting sales abroad in an effort
to reduce their tax bills) and they are
eager to state that they comply fully
with local tax codes.
As the Internet started to evolve, the
world grew smaller which created all
kinds of problems for governments
wanting to levy taxes on digital trade,
where no physical goods actually
crossed borders. From the taxman’s
point of view, how do you treat the
sale of advertising or digital marketing if the sales office is in London or
Dublin, but the buyer is somewhere in
Europe? Where is the digital service
actually ‘produced’?
As one solution to raising badly
needed tax revenues, some countries
including France and the UK implemented a Digital Sales Tax (DST), a
headline-grabbing gesture that was immediately rebuffed by the US, which
threatened to retaliate for supposedly
targeting US tech giants (a stance they
hold to this day). More than half of
Europe is still working towards introducing their own DST. A 2% DST was
introduced in the UK in 2020 aimed
at ‘soft’ sales of search engine services, social media advertising and the
like, but not consumer Internet sales.
eBay chose not to pass this tax on to
Ever since flatbed scanners first hit the
streets, OCR (optical character recognition) software has been available to
computer users and text-to-speech programs can convert the digitised results
into audio. Visually impaired persons
or those having reading difficulties can
Meanwhile, satellite broadcaster Sky
is launching a new streaming service called Sky Glass, comprising
a Sky-brand 4K UHD ‘carbon neutral’ flat screen package offering
43-inch, 55-inch and 65-inch
screen sizes in a range of five
chassis colours. Voice control is
built in and there are three HDMI
ports. It signifies Sky’s gradual
move away from satellite towards broadband-based delivery
– Sky’s new all-in-one screens are
a dish-free and box-free service Sky Glass is an all-in-one 4K UHD streaming package
and require Wi-Fi or wired Eth- that does away with a satellite dish and set-top
ernet. This self-contained screen box. It come in various sizes and chassis colours.
Practical Electronics | December | 2021
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Text-to-speech
Amazon’s $1,000 Astro bot is an Alexa on
wheels – but for US customers only for the
time being.
advertisers, but other tech firms have
added it to their bills.
The problem of taxing profits from
online trade is something the OECD
has been grappling with for years, as
it is only by international co-operation
that the issue will finally be settled. In
September a multinational agreement
was finally hammered out – engineered
by the US – to raise corporation tax
globally to a minimum 15%, which
is less than many countries already
levy anyway.
The EU is still considering its own
tax policies to address what it calls the
‘fair taxation of the digital economy’.
Expect more clamouring that high-tech
multinationals pay ‘the right amount
of tax’ and news about an EU directive before the year end. Until then,
it’s business as normal as far as the US
tech giants are concerned.
Alexa gets some wheels
With the festive season looming,
Amazon has been busy with some intriguing new product launches, many
focused on home security. As a sign of
things to come, their forthcoming Astro
The Ring ‘Always Home Cam’ drone will
patrol a single-storey property and relay video.
Amazon has opened its first ‘4 Star’ store
outside the US – in Kent, England.
‘household robot for home monitoring’ has Alexa built in and includes a
6-month free trial of the property monitoring service Ring Protect Pro. Astro
will obey your commands, follow you
around, patrol your premises, send
an alarm and perform many other
useful tasks on the go. It is likely to
cost $1,000 and is yet to be listed by
Amazon UK. Some early reviewers
muse that it might infringe privacy,
or fall down stairs! (For more details,
see: https://youtu.be/sj1t3msy8dc)
Amazon.com is also soft-launching
its Ring-brand ‘Always Home Cam’
security camera drone intended for domestic indoor use on a single storey;
it flies along custom flight paths that
users ‘train’ it to follow, and (naturally) it plays streaming video on an
app. Currently, Always Home Cam is
available by invitation only in the US.
Amazon UK introduced Echo Show
15, a 15.6-inch, 1080p Full HD flat
panel display and 5MP camera (with
built-in privacy shutter) that can be
wall-mounted or placed on a counter
using an optional stand. It features a
redesigned home screen, more customisation and promises all-new Alexa
experiences. The self-contained laptop-size screen is optimised for ‘family
organisation’ and could be the next
best thing to a smart TV in the kitchen,
Amazon reckons, as it supports Prime
Video and Amazon’s Drop-In video
calling. It has debuted at £239.99.
Pre-order from Amazon.co.uk
The company has also chosen Britain
to open its first non-foods ‘4 Star’ store
outside the US, in Bluewater, Greenhithe, Kent. The store will sell a special
selection of products that average an
Amazon 4-star rating, but it does not
use ‘Just Walk Out’ technology used in
Amazon Fresh stores (see PE, August
2021). A new ‘4-star’ option has been
glimpsed in Amazon’s shopping app
showing a QR code that might offer
buyers faster in-store checkouts.
Aviation Spirit
In other news, electrically powered
flight took a step towards reality on
15 September when Rolls-Royce announced a successful record-breaking
test flight of its new all-electric airplane, the Spirit of Innovation (noting
that the figurine adorning Rolls-Royce
cars is the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, see:
https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-rr1).
The electric plane first taxied in
March and finally left the ground at a
UK Ministry of Defence site in Britain
last month. Its aerodynamics are redolent of a Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered
Spitfire fighter plane, but in place of a
Spitfire’s aviation-spirit-fuelled piston
The Spirit of Innovation, an electric aircraft produced by Rolls-Royce takes its maiden flight in England.
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Practical Electronics | December | 2021
originally sailed from this (then tiny)
inlet port in north-east Lincolnshire,
England to Holland. The town recently
celebrated 400 years of the Mayflower’s voyage.
Pylon upgrade
Mayflower AI is an autonomous, crewless vessel packed with AI technology designed
for marine research.
engine is a 400kW powertrain containing the world’s most power-dense
battery pack ever built for an aircraft,
says Rolls-Royce. The Spirit of Innovation forms part of Rolls-Royce’s ACCEL
programme, short for ‘Accelerating the
Electrification of Flight’. You can follow
progress at: https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-rr2
America’s GE is also investing in electric flight, partnering with NASA and
MagniX USA in a new $260m EPFD
(Electric Powertrain Flight Demonstration) project, with commercial
passenger transport ultimately in mind.
Speed control
The automotive press has become very
excitable about the forthcoming implementation of automatic speed limiter
systems in new cars but, happily, Net
Work readers already know about them!
The September 2019 issue (p.13) forewarned that Intelligent Speed Assistance
(ISA) could eventually find its way into
cars, and ISAs (also known as ASLs)
are now mandated for new vehicle
sales from July 2022. A combination of
GPS or traffic sign recognition cameras
may be used to force a vehicle to slow
down to comply with prevailing speed
restrictions. Despite Brexit, it’s expected
that the UK will fall in line with these
European safety regulations, though it
will be many years before ISAs have
any impact on casualty rates.
Backed by the resources of IBM working with other marine partners, the
crewless Mayflower AI ship is an autonomous vessel and proving ground
for AI-powered marine research. With
no crew to worry about, Mayflower’s
designers were able to concentrate on
packing the vessel’s hull with AI technology instead. During some early trials,
problems with its hybrid solar-boosted powertrain were highlighted, so
Mayflower returned to dry dock in
Plymouth, England for improvements.
You can follow the vessel’s developments and view dashboard data at:
https://mas400.com/
Our friends in America might be interested in https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-mf
as, in actual fact, the Pilgrim fathers
Artist impression of the T-pylon test line at National Grid’s training academy, the first new
design for an electricity pylon in Great Britain for nearly a century.
Practical Electronics | December | 2021
The first new electric pylon design in
Britain for more than 100 years has
been erected by contractors Balfour
Beatty for National Grid in Somerset,
England. The new T-Pylon reduces
a pylon’s footprint compared with
traditional lattice towers commonly
populating the British countryside.
(Landowners and farmers receive an
annual ‘way leave’ rental for hosting
pylons and pipelines on their land,
in case you ever wondered). The new
design is a single pole with T-shaped
arms carrying diamond-shaped cable
arrays, and some of the new pylons also
contain a time capsule laid by local
schoolchildren containing, of course,
Covid-19 face masks and lateral flow
tests for posterity.
Finally, an interesting footnote to my
item in the September issue (page 14)
about Virgin Orbit’s satellite-launching service based on their specially
adapted jumbo jets, and the controversial Nord2 gas pipeline running
between Russia and Germany (PE, October 2021, p.13). A fascinating article
published on Theaviationgeekclub.com
describes a period in the 1990s when
the US tried its best to buy three Soviet
Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers that
were being disposed of by the Ukrainian Air Force. The US badly wanted
to ensure they did not find their way
back to Russia, and US companies
had also won contracts for scrapping
military hardware that had become a
financial burden for Ukraine. It turns
out, according to author Dario Leone,
that three Tu-160 bombers were pencilled in for purchase by America’s
Platforms International Corp in 1999
who, it was said, [ostensibly] intended
to convert them into launch platforms
for Pegasus Launch Vehicles to place
satellites into low-earth orbit. The
more things change, the more they
stay the same: an added irony is that
Ukraine needed the money because it
was deeply in debt to Russia because of
unpaid gas bills. You can read the full
article at: https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-tu160
The Northrop Grumman Pegasus
project pre-dates the Virgin Orbit 747
satellite launcher and Wikipedia has
an item at: https://bit.ly/pe-dec21-ngp
See you next month for more news
and updates from Net Work!
The author can be reached at:
alan<at>epemag.net
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