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July 21, 2003
Wheels of Zeus (WOZ)
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has released information on the management team that will be heading up his new startup Wheels of Zeus. News.com has the full story.
Two things are of interest (at least to me):
1) One of the management team is Gina Clark, who was previously at PalmSource. Gina worked closely to help get the Palm OS User Council (of which I'm a member) off the ground back in 2001.
2) The News.com article states that not much is known about Wheels of Zeus other than it involves some form of wireless services. Indeed, the company website offers relatively little information about the nature or form of what services WOZ will deliver.
Well, we may be able to shed some light on the nature of these services. It appears that Wheels of Zeus will let you geographically track physical objects and/or people in real time. For example, if you want to be alerted if your dog leaves your yard, you can attach a WOZ tag to his collar and set up the system to call your cell when that tag leaves the boundaries of your yard. Pretty cool...I hope it actually gets launched so we can try it out.
Following are a series of screenshots from a demo of Wheels of Zeus. It's all web-based, so these are browser screenshots. They are dated March 10, 2003, so things may have (and likely have) changed since then. But, it gives us some interesting behind-the-scenes looks at this intriguing new wireless service from Mr. Wozniak.
Note that these will pop up in a new browser window:
• Screenshot 1 - List of user's current tags
• Screenshot 2 - "Add a New Tag" screen
• Screenshot 3 - Creating a new alert
• Screenshot 4 - Defining a geographic zone
• Screenshot 5 - List of user's current notifications
• Screenshot 6 - An active alert screen
• Screenshot 7 - Current real-time status of user's tags
• Screenshot 8 - Initial user menu (isn't that kid one of the Hanson's?)
• Screenshot 9 - A help screen