THIS WEEK IN TECTORIA

A community blog celebrating Victoria's booming tech sector

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Got a cool story about technology and creativity in Victoria? Email stories, tips, pictures, links and anything of interest to Tessa Bousfield at: tectoria@viatec.ca

Archives for April 2014

How Amazon Fire TV Stacks Up To Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku

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amazon fire tv

Amazon has just announced its streaming TV media device: Fire TV is a yet another direct challenge by Amazon against other tech giants and incumbents.

So how does the Amazon TV compare to Apple TV, Google Chromecast and Roku’s lineup?

First-party content for a cheaper price

Amazon Instant Video library is huge and well-known, and offers a vast range of content from well-recognized sources. Amazon also features some exclusive streaming deals, and is also starting produce original content.

The price tag? $99 a year.

Apple TV is perhaps the biggest competitor with an equally vast amount of content, but to access all of it you are going to pay more than Amazon’s $99 a year.

Google Play does not feature nearly the same variety of content, while Roku relies on third-party content.

Third-party content

Third-party content in this context means being able to use a smartphone, combined with an app, to stream content to your television. Google’s Chromecast is designed specifically to do this, as are Roku, and Apple TV and Airplay.

However, third-party content provider Netflix competes directly with Amazon Instant, and for the moment Amazon Fire TV will have a lot of catching up to do… if Amazon is truly serious about facilitating third-party content.

Gaming

Neither Chromecast nor Roku currently offer a compelling gaming experience, while Apple TV offers no games at all. On the other hand, Amazon Fire TV looks like it is committed to providing a quality gaming experience.

Size and ease of use

Chromecast is a simple (and cheap) HDMI dongle, and Roku offers a similar “stick” device. Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV are more traditional boxes with cables and power cords.

All have their advantages and disadvantages when setting up, with no clear winner.

Price

Apple TV is $99; the Roku series ranges from $50 to $100. Google’s Chromecast is just $35. Amazon’s Fire TV is $99.

Tectorian of the Week – EchoSec

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tectorian_of_the_week.1_1_.2EchoSec, the brainchild of Karl Swannie and his Victoria-based team, is our Tectorian of the week.

Recently featured in a thought-provoking and somewhat alarming in-depth Vancouver Sun feature, EchoSec’s made-in-Victoria technology hunts for media that has been geo-tagged and is offered by open web servers, going beyond commonly used search tools to enable anyone to capture, curate, manage, process and visualize data in an entirely new way.

Combining geo-tagged location data with social media feeds

In a nutshell, EchoSec combines geo-tagged location data with social media feeds to learn just about anything about anyone online: where you live, where you work, what time you go to work, and possibly even what you were doing at work if you happened to be logged in to any number of popular social networks.

EchoSec aggregates all this information in a single search.

Indeed, the Vancouver Sun writer decided to randomly pick out a traveller at the Vancouver airport to see how much could learned from the traveller’s digital trail.

A completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world

Swannie and his team stumbled across their discovery by accident while working on a search engine to help urban planners determine how people use public spaces.

The EchoSec team is using their unique technology to demonstrate to police, governments, companies and even military organizations that they should be aware information is being shared that is timestamped, traceable, and can be “mined, followed and predicted.”

EchoSec’s unique way of harvesting and displaying dynamic and user-generated content from sites like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram gives EchoSec a completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world.

Try out the free version of EchoSec and find out for yourself

The free, public version of the EchoSec search engine pulls from just a handful of feeds, while the full version will have close to 500 sources of information that can deliver everything from the risky to the risqué.

Try the EchoSec public app here.