Blumoo is a device designed to replace all of those remotes for each of your entertainment center devices. It lets you customize the perfect virtual remote with only the controls you want, exactly where you want them. Oh, and there’s also the extra bonus of adding Bluetooth streaming to your older audio gear.

Blumoo works like the Logitech Harmony Ultimate Hub, receiving signals from a smartphone app and then blasting out the appropriate IR signals to control your TV, stereo receiver, DVD and Blu-ray players, CD player, cable box, whatever. While the Ultimate Hub connects to your smartphone over Wi-Fi, Blumoo uses Bluetooth 4.0, so it works even if your Wi-Fi is down. 

It’s easy to set up, and while the app badly needs an interface makeover, it’s a convenient way to make all your entertainment gear work together smoothly, regardless of brand or vintage. Blumoo supports 225,000 devices from over 5,000 brands, and the app makes adding new ones easy.

The Blumoo device is about 2 by 3 inches, looking like a small futuristic coffee mug. One wire trails from the back, leading to a connector with ports for the AC power brick, the included 3.5mm-to-RCA audio cable, and an optional infrared extension, which isn’t included. All you have to do is plug it in and set it near your home theater gear.

You can use the app on a smartphone or tablet running Android 4.0 or higher or iOS 6.0 or higher. Your device has to support Bluetooth 4.0, so for iOS devices, that’s iPhone 4S, iPad 3, and iPad mini and newer. There’s no native iPad app, but the iPhone app’s overly small buttons actually benefit from being blown up to 2x on an iPad screen.

Once you’ve got the universal remote features up and running and tweaked to your heart’s content, the Blumoo app’s other two tabs feel like inconsequential add-ons, but they do add value. The Guide tab shows you what’s on TV, based on your service provider. The Music tab gets you to control your streaming music.
Blumoo retails for $129, but you can get it from Amazon for $99.  

The next time you’re thinking of throwing away a used boarding pass with a barcode on it, consider inserting the boarding pass into a document shredder instead. Two-dimensional barcodes and QR codes can hold a great deal of information, and the codes printed on airline boarding passes may allow someone to discover more about you, your future travel plans, and your frequent flyer account.

In a recent test of a Lufthansa boarding pass, security experts were able to ascertain the following pieces of information about the flyer: Name, Frequent Flyer Number, Record Locator for trip, and other personally identifiable information.

With this data, the testers logged into Lufthansa’s website and were able to get the name of the person who made the reservations and the phone number of the traveler. With this access, anyone could change seats on future flight legs and even cancel a future flight and apply for a refund. The information would also allow someone to get access to the traveler’s frequent flyer account where a perpetrator could cash in points for travel or other gifts or merchandise.

Suffice it to say, there appears to be a security issue with the seemingly simple boarding pass.
It’s not the first time the contents of boarding pass barcodes has come into question: in 2012, a security vulnerability in US domestic airline boarding passes meant that travelers could scan the barcodes to reveal what kind of checks they were likely to face.
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For the most part, if you keep your boarding pass quietly about your person, your details are likely to remain safe. Leaving it on the plane is not the best idea and for those who share everything on social media, security experts suggest not sharing on Facebook or other online venues.  

​Two CEOs share the same vision of what personalization will mean to the enterprise in the near future. At a conference sponsored by cloud storage giant Box, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple said his company was starting to focus on the enterprise.

“We want to make tools to help people change the world, and that means being in the enterprise,” Mr. Cook said to the conference. It is, he said, “a huge opportunity for us.”

Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, endorsed that view when he addressed the conference. “Industrial companies have yet to feel the benefit of the Internet the way consumers have,” he said in an interview. “We’re just getting started.”

Each man takes his stand relative to where he sits. Mr. Cook talked about the prospects for the kind of mobile Internet services delivered on iPhones and iPads and developed on Macs. Mr. Immelt is building a system of sensors and so-called predictive data analytics that he hopes will deliver to GE $10 billion in revenue by 2020.

But what does it mean for business technology to be like consumer tech? Looking at consumer tech today, the answer is personalization.

For example, Tesla cars and Nest thermostats are designed to watch what you do with them and adjust themselves to better serve you.

Remarkably, mass-produced goods increasingly personalize into something unique because of a lot of snooping on you. Few consumers turn personalizing features off, adjust use or boycott the products. In a conflict of personalization and privacy, personalization has triumphed.

Mr. Immelt foresaw much the same kind of thing happening with machines. “We can now track every jet engine separately throughout its life,” he said, giving each one the machine equivalent of a Facebook page, which states where it is and how it is “feeling,” making maintenance more efficient.

There will be benefits from this move to personalization like buying a used car and knowing how it was driven and what is likely to go wrong with it in the future.

“There is a huge opportunity for efficiency gains, but there will be side effects from taking out all the opacity around how things last and behave,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT. “A product that is 30%, or even 0.3% better will get ordered more.”
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Within a few years, we’ll know whether or not the personalization that has made the consumer Internet will provide the same benefits to the enterprise. If it does, the corporate community will be delighted with the rewards of being spied on, even if they don’t know all of the ramifications.

​Google wasn’t going to be out done by Apple, so this past week, CEO Sundar Pichai hosted a press event saying "This year we've gone a step forward. We have a more comprehensive lineup." During the event, the company showed off two smartphones, two streaming devices, a tablet and a new version of its Android software.

Google's desire to sell more electronics pushes consumers toward its real moneymaker: the search, YouTube and maps services that contribute to its more than $65 billion in annual revenue. The strategy has been so successful that the European Commission is investigating the company's business practices around its mobile products. The US Federal Trade Commission has reportedly started a similar investigation.

Two Smartphones. The first device, made by LG, was the Nexus 5X with a 5.2” screen. The phone is powered by a hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor for world-class speed at an affordable price. The unit also boasts a 12.5-megapixel camera designed to ‘shine’ in low light. The other device, made by Huawei, was the Nexus 6P with a 5.7” screen powered by a Snapdragon 810 v2.1 processor. Both devices will work with Project Fi, the company's experimental wireless service. They both also support Nexus Imprint for fingerprint sensing and increased security and the new standard USB Type-C connector for charging.

Expanding the Nexus line also helps Google's broader wireless plans. Nexus is an important testing ground for Google's Project Fi, an experimental wireless carrier service that switches between cellular and Wi-Fi signals on the fly. The service, which should curb cell phone bills by reducing the amount of data used, had until now been compatible with only one phone, the Nexus 6, which Google released last year.

Streaming Devices. The company also unveiled new Chromecast sticks, which are designed to turn dumb devices, like older TVs or speakers, into Web-ready gizmos for services like Netflix and Spotify. First was an updated version of the Chromecast video streaming device, as well as a new device specifically for streaming audio to any sound system with a headphone jack.

The devices are part of Google's multipronged strategy for getting its technology into homes. Some of Google's gear, such as its Nest thermostat and smoke detector, are the cutting edge of connected home devices. Chromecast devices, by contrast, focus on what you already have.

Tablet – Convertible. The company also revealed a new tablet called the Pixel C. It looks like the little brother to the Chromebook Pixel. Its aluminum shell has that same look and feel and it has a USB Type-C port and a gorgeous 2,560 x 1,800 display.

The unit also accepts an optional keyboard to provide the ‘convertible’ functionality. The genius here is that instead of attaching via a cumbersome dock, the tablet connects to the keyboard via magnets. There's a special flip-up backstop on the keyboard that automatically self-aligns to the tablet's rear, at which point you can position the tablet as a display. The 32GB version runs $499 and the 64GB version is $599 with $149 extra for the optional keyboard.
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Big screens, small screens, movies and music. Google wants to be everything to everyone and this past week’s announcements certainly help it move to that goal.  