An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO
Ytai Ben-Tsvi is the creative mind behind the IOIO (pronounced “yo-yo”). It is a hobby development board similar to the Arduino, but designed specifically to attach hobby peripherals to an Android phone through the USB port. I recently had a chance to interview him. What is the story behind the IOIO board and what has been your involvement thus far? In the summer of 2010 I was in California on a business trip (I was living in Israel then). A colleague of mine was telling me about the cellbots.com project that he was involved with. They were building little hobby robots based around Android phones. He was unhappy about the hacky ways they were using to connect the phone to motors and asked me whether I have an idea to fix this. After a couple of days, I thought I found a solution and that’s how IOIO was born. Another thing that makes it…
Weekend Journal — The Other Direction of Trickle Down Techonomics
A few weeks ago I wrote about Trickle Down Technonomics, or more simply: how large investments in prior research can and do still affect us in the modern day. Since then, an article from the author of a forthcoming book on Bell Labs wrote an intriguing piece in the New York Times. I highly recommend checking it out. And while I haven’t changed my mind about the necessity of high-level research and investment, there was a glaring problem with the last post and my focus on high level: it’s not realistic these days. I’m not sure about the socio-political feed-ins that allowed raw research investment back then, aside from the specific example of AT&T’s glaring monopoly in the case of Bell Labs. What I do know is that research for the sake of research in a for-profit company seems to makes people (managers) more squeamish these days. Perhaps it was…