Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo! wants us to look for angry people.
The premise of his highly-entertaining talk centered around the concept of getting products to market by finding the frustrated people; the folks who have pain. These are people who will pay to solve that pain.
That’s why so many of us are excited about Emerging Telecom. There sure is a lot of anger and pain. If you are sadistic, masochistic, or ideally both, Telecom is for you!
Benoit Schillings says open source is coming to a mobile handset near you. The Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech brings the freedom of Linux to the cell phone. Fully open and customizable, the folks at Trolltech want to provide the environment and hardware, and allow the community to figure out what applications are relevant.
The big guys are thinking this way too. Both Motorola and Nokia have open source websites (http://opensource.motorola.com and http://opensource.nokia.com/).
The people that are building the hardware are giving us the tools to create and deliver applications to mobile devices.
Now, we just need to convince the carriers to allow us to deliver these ideas on their closed, locked-down, expensive networks. Not sure when that’s going to happen. Must be why everybody wants their cell phone to do WiFi (yeah, I’m going to get a Nokia E61 as well).
Ah well, we’re heading in the right direction . . . aren’t we?
My colleague Lee S. Dryburgh is discussing trust and how it works on the Internet; without strong authentication, anyone can claim to be anything. As an example, he showed a fat man drinking a glass of beer who claims, in his online profile, that he doesn’t drink and has a “toned” body.
But I disagree with Lee about the role of telco operators in this ecosystem. First of all, while the telco operators can authenticate the SIM cards, they don’t always authenticate the user. Secondly, I don’t trust the telcos to manage the huge problems associated with lost credentials, name changes, and the like. A SIM card is a low-stakes identity credential — you can get as many of them as you like. But if they become the basis of identity verification, the telcos will no doubt administer these systems with their typical compassion, customer service, and altruistic pricing models.
And, finally, I just can’t see my local telco deciding if I’m allowed to claim that I am “toned.”
I’m suffering from a severe case of device envy.
Right now Tero Ojanpera of Nokia is speaking about the new Nokia devices; the N800 wireless Linux tablet looks very nice, and clearly I need one of those. Many of my colleagues are carrying N61’s, and clearly I need one of those. And the Neo/OpenMoko open-source phone looks terrific, and clearly I need one of those as well.
Tero just stated that given GPS, cameras, and orienation sensors, and presence notification of your friends, you should be able to (or currently can?) use the camera to pick friends out of a crowd by having an overlay appear over a photo of their location. Clearly I need one of those devices, too.
I often go to my tailor to customize my new clothes with extra pockets and zippers, but I think I may need a wear a harness to carry all the gear that I now “need.” This conference is going to cost me a lot more than I originally thought!
The first-ever ETel Launch Pad event was quite a crowd-pleaser. It didn’t hurt that uber-blogger Om Malik was the host of this Demo-style event, and he definitely added a bit of class to the presentation. It also didn’t hurt that the event sponsors hosted a reception afterwards, and the libations were flowing freely. But the highlight of the evening was definitely seeing what the chosen entrepreneurs were up to. ETel is all about celebrating the people and companies who are pushing the boundaries and chipping away at the closed systems and walled gardens that have stifled innovative communications services for so long. It’s an exciting time in telecommunications.
The entrants were: GrandCentral, OpenFire (previously WIldFire) by Jive Software, and Cellcrypt, Peerant, mySay, the Flat Planet Phone Company, and Project Goth’s MIG33,
Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet of GrandCentral demo’d their service, including showing off my favorite feature, the ability to listen in to a voice mail message as it’s being left (and break in if desired).
“Voice is collaboration” is the premise behind Jive’s OpenFire, which is an open protocol real time collaboration tool. OpenFire now supports SIP, Jingle, and XMPP. They believe that the IM client will be the one desktop client that survives the migration to the network, and they base much of their work on the instant messaging model.
Cellcrypt is focused on voice security, and has a voice encryption client for cell phones, the Cellcrypt Communicator, and launched today a secure voice mail product. The idea is to develop voice security that is as easy to use as https is for secure web transactions, simple enough for mom to use. A new release of Cellcrypt Communicator will be announced next week, which will support more handset models.
Peerant is in the peer-to-peer space, leverages existing P2P and VoIP systems, and is built with Ruby. An eBay demo was shown where a remote call center employee gets access to various information from the caller via an intelligent screen pop. The Peerant P2P Web Manager makes setting up and adding agents to such call center campaigns extremely simple.
mySay is a phone service for staying in touch with their friends, a bit like a voice-based twitter I think. People call mySay, listen to the updates from their friends, and add an update to their friends if they like. mySay is an Irish start-up and their beta is launching in April, but they gave a preview to the ETel audience of their service.
Moshe Maeir is the founder and Chief Flattening Officer of the Flat Planet Phone Company, which was created to bring advanced telephony services to small businesses. They have built a system where SMBs that have multiple locations can operate seamlessly with regards to their communications. They also have developed a unique reseller model, where they will handle the hosting, provisioning, and support aspects of a company’s communications
products and services.
Project Goth’s MIG33 tries to address the issue that while PSTN and IP telephony rates have plunged, mobile calling, especially internationally, is still very expensive. MIG33 is attempting to bring together mobile VoIP, messaging, and social networking, and connect any two phones via VoIP. MIG33 is based on an ultra light J2ME client (and an AJAX web site and a VoIP desktop client). While most users sign up for the cheap mobile VoIP calling, they find the social aspects very sticky and compelling.
One unique factor to the ETel Launch Pad was that the audience got to participate in real time by casting votes for their favorite entry, using the Mozes SMS-to-Web service. It was neat to see the tallies for each entrant changing as the audience all started texting their choices. The winner will be announced tomorrow.
I’m a systems integrator by trade, not a programmer, but I like to think that in a different life I might have made a good one. The last language I learned really well was REXX (even did socket and serial port programming with it [shudder]).
In any case, the urge to learn a programming language causes me angst every now and then, and Ruby has been stirring up . . . feelings in me.
Having just experienced Jay Phillips’ introduction to Adhearsion, the urges are getting stronger. Every time I hear Ruby proponents talk, they seem barely able to contain tears of joy. Observe Ruby programmers when they talk to each other: They always look at each other with a twinkle in their eyes: a gaze that suggests that they share in some marvelous secret. This seems to be a universal phenomenon.
Even folks that are not proponents seem to have a hard time finding bad things to say. The worst that I hear is something along the lines of “um . . . it’s pretty good” (and that is an attempt at criticism!).
Time to start reading . . .
Here at ETEL 2007, The VOIPSA folks just presented an excellent discussion on VoIP security issues.
The fact is, we all know that security is going to be a huge issue in VoIP (or is supposed to be already), and despite all the attention, it seems that it doesn’t get the effort it deserves; it’s just not a crisis yet.
Hoping to avert the crisis, the VOIP Security Alliance http://www.voipsa.org fulfills an important role: getting folks talking about security and VoIP, and more importantly, offering solutions.
Check out their excellent website, join the really top-notch mailing list, and get yourself informed. Someday very soon we’ll be glad that these folks have done so much already. When the pain comes, there will be medicine.
It’s ETel time, and it’s clear that Surj Patel has put together another fantastic conference. One way I judge these things is how hard it is to decide which sessions to attend, and I can honestly say that for this one there is not one time slot that I’m not frustrated about something I’ll have to miss. Nice going, Surj.
I started my day going to the OpenMoko workshop, and I came away pretty impressed with this open source phone project. Sean Moss-Pulz is the product manager for OpenMoko, and a passionate speaker on the need for opening up our phone platforms and the benefits of making some real progress towards a ubiquitous computing environment.
On a basic level, the OpenMoko project is about giving people the ability to change the things they hate about their phones (and I agree with Sean that is a near-universal sentiment. I know I despise mine). The vision is for a truly open, carrier-independent mobile phone that runs a free linux-based OS. And they are very close to releasing such a device (dubbed the Neo 1973, for “new 1973″, the year the mobile phone was invented). The OpenMoko roadmap calls for a developer model to be available for purchase next month, and a mass-market version to follow six months later. The phone prototype is a very attractive, touch-screen based device, that vaguely looks like the new iPhone design, and includes strong GPS (but no camera or wi-fi in the first version).
One point that Seam made that seemed to resonate with the audience, was that there is so much more our phones could do and be for us, if we can just break out of the proprietary, carrier-controlled ecosystem that our mobile phones currently exist in. One example he gave was that their lead developer is a guitar player, and thought it would be nifty if his phone could also work as his electronic guitar tuner. So he built that application for the OpenMoko. It wasn’t a complicated coding project, but the concept of being able to turn on a cell phone’s microphone when it’s not participating in a voice call is foreign to other cell phones (as well as scary for security types). Access to the core pieces of the OpenMoko device may enable all sorts of innovative phone uses and applications.
The OpenMoko.org web site was just launched on February 12, and there are all kinds of ways for interested developers to get involved, including the project mailing lists, wiki, IRC channel, bugzilla, planet, etc. The OpenMoko site provides all the hosting and infrastructure needed for app development related to this project. If you’re a developer who cares about opening up the world of mobile phones, I suggest you check it out.
Lee’s debate at the Etel conference moved me from indifference over the telco’s IMS initiative to outright fear. IMS is more than a transport layer; it’s more than another effort to introduce a “Service Creation Environment” into the legacy telco networks. If it were just those two I could ignore IMS, because telcos have been attempting to introduce flexibile service creation environments for decades.
But IMS invites invasion of privacy and data mining. IMS, according to the telcos, will manage your address book, your “friends” list, your social networking contacts, and perhaps what you have for breakfast tommorow morning. By opening your data, your network browsing, and your calling history to other telcos and — perhaps, but almost certainly — to marketing organizations, your entire life becomes available to anyone with a checkbook.
On the bright side, the telcos intend to control which third-party applications run on IMS. Since it’s unimaginable that any imaginative new technology — such as blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, or even Google — would ever be allowed to see the light of day on the staid telco networks, nothing worthwhile (aside from stodgy or clueless institutions) will use IMS. I hope…
I spent some time this morning at ETel talking to Craig Walker, CEO of GrandCentral, and getting a tour of this exciting new application. I’ve been slow to jump on the GrandCentral bandwagon, and wasn’t initially that interested in a service that seemed to basically offer me yet another new phone number.
Well, I stand corrected, and after seeing all that GrandCentral can do in person, I’m going to start using it in my daily life now. Craig showed me a bunch of cool features that GrandCentral offers, including its well-known “one number for life” that can ring multiple phones, customized voice mail greetings and ringback tones (and playlists!) for specified groups or individual numbers, call recording, voice mail to email, and a nice web management interface.
But I’ll confess the feature that really sucked me in was its ability to send calls that come to my cell phone to voice mail, but with the option to listen in on the message and break in on the call if needed. I admit it, I’m a call screener — I’ve refused to let go of my home answering machine for just this reason. And the ability to extend my screening to all of my calls, especially mobile calls, is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
Craig likes to position GrandCentral as “your own little phone company”, where the control of your telephone features and settings have moved to the edge of the network, and are made much easier for users to access. I think that’s a good selling point for GrandCentral, I know I’d much rather log onto a web page to make some change to my phone settings than try to call my carrier to add, remove, or change a feature.
(Preview hint: GrandCentral was one of the companies selected to participate in tonight’s ETel Launch Pad event, and they will be unveiling a brand new web site with some new and improved features, like better voice mail playback control, to coincide with this. Check back soon for the new site.)
I am giving a talk titled “Building A Telecom Business Without Selling Your Soul” Tuesday morning at ETel. The talk is about how to bootstrap a business without taking on millions of dollars of other people’s money (I funded all three of my businesses with less than $250,000 in investment). A key theme in my talk is about how telecom is full of niche opportunities which are themselves decent sized businesses. Corporate IVR, which we are all victimized by, is one example of how there are still plenty of opportunities in telecom…
Microsoft has just put out an official list of software applications that are supported on Windows Vista. It’s a long list, but some important and popular programs are missing, including Skype. Slashdot points out that none of Adobe or Symantec’s programs are on the list either, which would seem like some pretty ominous omissions.
It’s not clear to me if this is a beaurecratic/certification issue, or there are genuine issues with running Skype on Vista. If any ETel readers are currently using Skype on Vista, please drop a note in the comment section and tell us how your experience has been so far.
CNet has the scoop on Skype’s recent petition to the FCC asking for the U.S. cellular carriers to open up their networks.
In a document dated February 20, Skype asked the FCC to apply to the wireless industry what is known as the “Carterfone” rules, which would allow consumers to use devices and software of their choice on cell phone networks.
Skype’s motivations are clear. The company has created software that allows people to make free phone calls across the Internet. And now it wants users who access the Internet via a mobile device to be able to use their software and services, too.
“We want to allow our users to use the Skype software where ever they are,” said Christopher Libertelli, senior director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype. “And we want to make sure the policy is set in the right direction so that when Skype users want to use it on mobile devices, they’ll be able to.”
I seriously doubt that anyone at Skype thinks the current FCC will grant this request, but you can’t blame them for asking. This follows a recently-released report by Columbia University Law professor Tim Wu, Wireless Net Neutrality: Cellular Carterfone and Consumer Choice in Mobile Broadband, that also makes the argument that the historic Carterfone decision should be applied to the cellular networks.
It’s hard to imagine how the application of Carterfone to the cellular industry wouldn’t result in a big win for consumers. But that doesn’t mean that Kevin Martin’s telco-friendly FCC will act in the consumer interest.
In another sign that the innovative companies in the telecom space are beginning to work more closely together, Grand Central has announced they have now integrated with Project Gizmo, meaning that you can now get all of your Grand Central calls on your Gizmo number. I haven’t yet played with Grand Central, but this interoperability announcement will likely get me to, as I am a happy Gizmo user.
As several have pointed out, this combination can be especially powerful for the road warriors among us, like Andy Abramson. Andy’s already tried it out, and sees some real savings potential, especially when combined with Nokia’s new series of wi-fi capable phones:
This combination is killer for those of us who travel and have wired broadband in the hotel. Bring along a WiFi travel router, plug that into the hotel’s broadband network ad use a N80-Internet Edition dual mode phone from Nokia and the calls are free as you’ll avoid cellular carrier airtime. Or if you have one, try Gizmo on a Nokia Internet Tablet 770 or Nseries 800.
As Alec Saunders points out, this isn’t really that deep of an integration, and he’d like to see these kind of mashups taken to the next level, beyond just peering arrangements:
What would have been really exciting is to have seen Grand Central integrated with the Gizmo / SipPhone experience, rather than yet another peering agreement. Imagine accessing all of the Grand Central capabilities from within the SIPPhone universe, rather than handing calls from Grand Central off to the SIPPhone network. Imagine a world where callers to my Gizmo identity reached the GC feature set as part of the Gizmo experience.
(Alec also came back with an apology for the rantiness of his post, an unnecessary one in my opinion. Alec’s “rants” make more sense to me than just about anyone else’s analysis in this space. His second post makes some great points about the tradeoffs a small company must make when considering integrating with others services or innovating for a better customer experience.)
We’re beginning to see a lot of interesting possibilities around telephony mashups. Matthew Miller writes about the advantages of combining Grand Central and TalkPlus, Luca points out the possibilities in a Grand Central / Sitofono integration, and Alec describes a presence-driven personal assistant service created by combining Angel.com and iotum’s products.
It should be really interesting to see what comes out of the O’Reilly/StrikeIron ETel Mashup contest. The winner will be selected and will get to present at next week’s Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco. There’s still time to register, I hope to see you there!
In our latest ETel article, Doesn’t the Social Web Realize That People Talk?, Trevor Baca examines the sad state of voice integration in the social web, looking at the factors that have kept voice from being a common component of many popular web sites and services. Baca will present Voice and the Web: The New Terrain at next week’s Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco. There’s still time to register for this ground-breaking conference, I hope to see you there!
We’ve recently seen the tiny and the titanic begin moves to support the sublime OpenID; in the last few weeks, AOL and Microsoft announced their OpenID plans and yesterday, Digg also signalled its intent.
Microsoft and AOL represent hundreds of millions of IDs, available on many platforms…so where are the telcos? Could a combination of OpenID, .name and ENUM finally uncouple your telephony identity from your telco?
I’ve used imran@ali.name and imran.ali.name as my personal email and web addresses since 2002, now I can use them to sign-in to web services…it’s only small step to map my cell number onto those IDs…
I was playing with the recently re-released Mac build of Joost this evening and noticed the kind of bug that’s sure to infuriate content providers.
Curiously, the BBC are continuing to run some very interesting pieces on mobile usage in the developing world.
Yesterday’s Mobile phone lifeline for world’s poor describes mobile technologies as agents of change in tackling poverty; enabling a generation of micro-entrepreneurs to sell air-time, renting & share handsets and provide banking and money transfer capabilities.
I’m curious to see what the organisations and users behind these services - Grameen, TradeNet, Bharti and others - will make of the OLPC project.
The recent phenomenon of services emanting from the developing world appears largely driven by real need and users themselves. OLPC seems to be a very interesting set of technologies in search of usage, but I’m not sure it will have the desired philanthropic impact. Simply focussing on empowering only children and ignoring adult needs as well as dismissing an ever more ubiquitous mobile infrastructure could render the project obsolete before the first devices even ship.
I heart disruptive services and technologies. Especially the kind that enable something obvious that consumers have been asking for but have been denied.
While this falls under the “few on the internet are likely to care” category the gtalk2voip service has added Yahoo! Messenger support. This (for now) open and free gateway allows Google Talk, MSN/Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and SIP phone users to call one another for free.
At the moment it appears that 3rd Party Interop is the way forward. For the sake of QoS, etc I really hope the “right” companies will peer their gateways and open up access. From my perspective this is just a hack in the right direction. Albeit, one I intend to start using.
I left Orange in December and crossed into civilian life as a mobile customer for the first time in my life - I now know the pain of selecting a tariff and handset when you’re on the outside, I’ve spend 4 hours on various support lines today arguing swearing, sweet-talking and finally plotting murder. Let me tell you my story…
But WiFi has 1990s bandwidth; you’ll be frustrated trying to download your daughter’s video. WiMAX can break the bandwidth barrier, but it’s a costly, centralized technology that has to be rolled out by large institutions. Fiber is even more of a long-range investment, and requires labor-intensive installation.
The promise of Ronja is mesh technology that can deliver 10 Mbps and can be built by an amateur in his or her own home for $100 per unit. The specs are all open-source. Where costs or regulations delay the stringing of cable or fiber, this technology could quickly bring neighborhoods into the twenty-first century in terms of bandwidth and universal service. Applications such as interactive video teleconferencing and remote application access with large remote data storage become immediate possibilities.
Anything that threatens the sacred cow of metered business, whether it’s minutes or bits you’re metering, is something that needs to be blocked at all costs by the telcos. Fortunately, the structure of the American mobile telephone industry gives them a solid way to play defense. Carriers buy the phones and sell them on to the end users, which handily makes them the major buyers of handsets, and the de facto arbiters of taste and consumer preference. (”Nice VoIP client in the handset. We’ll take…zero. If you’d stop dabbling in VoIP, though, we’ll take several million.”)
The “control your customers and force feed them” model cuts against my entire experience, which is based on open systems and architectures. In theory, an upstart could design a cool GSM phone and sell it directly to end users, bypassing the control-freak middlemen telcos. I had hoped that Apple would do just that. They are the one company that could build a phone that they could sell directly to hordes of consumers without help from the carrier.
Instead, it appears that Apple is building a traditional phone, with all of the carrier lock-in. There’s a big step forward in voice mail usability in the iPhone, and obviously a big short-term benefit to apple in working with the Cingular sales channel. In the long term, there is a much more diffuse long-term benefit of breaking the innovation choke-hold, though it is questionable as to how much of a changed market Apple could capture. Now that Steve Jobs has decided that DRM is evil, I’d like to see him come to a similar conclusion about the mobile phone business.
Until he does, at least I have a true open mobile phone platform on the way, even if it is slightly delayed.
Power Line Communications (PLC) is the use of existing electrical cables to transport data, and it has been around for a very long time. In our latest ETel article, An Introduction to Power Line Communications, Xavier Carcelle takes a look at the current state of PLC.
I’ll be posting pictures from 3GSM and Barcelona in general on my Flickr site throughout the week (also be sure to check out the set Mary Mary So Contrary)
(Name Redacted) of (Company Name Redacted) and I are inviting startups at 3GSM to join us at our “penthouse” apartment later this Thursday after the show closes (630 or 7). If you’re a mobile startup or know someone who is, pass the word on. We’re in the middle of the Old City, so bring a bottle and some friends and join us on our terrace. Email brian // mcconnell.net for details. Watch the 3GSM Twitter group for more info.
First, our buddy Surj became a Dad all over again! Surj, congrats to you and your family!
Second, I’m blushing because I was part of the small team at Yahoo! that just helped launch Pipes. I’m hopeful that some will find cool, new ways to power telephony apps using Pipes data. And, perhaps demo them at eTel!
Third, today was the first of a few mobile development classes I put together this month for my fellow employee’s at Yahoo!. I had bloodshot eyes from being up all night with the Pipes team but it paidoff to be back in the office early because we had an awesome turnout. Michael Sharon gave a hour long presentation on the state of mobile followed by a full-day workshop in J2ME development. I have much respect for Michael being able to successfully lead a 8-hour workshop! Not to mention, the company he co-founded, Socialight, is looking better and better.
Thanks for letting me share a great 24 hours, now time for some rest.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Jan Chipchase’s work in investigating mobile usage patterns in the developing world…the Next Billion.. Today, the BBC reported on Indian mobile base stations, powered by biofuels.
Writers often breathlessly speak of the potential of India’s mobile telephony market often overlooking sporadic availability of electricity both for infrastructure and for charging handsets.
The GSMA appear to have recognised this problem and are addressing it using the most plentiful and accessible sources of energy.
I’d like to end this post with a quip about how Indian mobile coverage could quite literally be sh*t. That’d be really funny…but I won’t.
UPDATE: The BBC seem to be running a few stories with these themes recently:
- Mobile phones to send money home
- Mobile networks powered by wind
O’Reilly Media and StrikeIron have joined together to put on the first ever Telephony Mashup Contest at this month’s Emerging Telephony conference. Here’s a chance for creative telecom developers to show their stuff as the finalists will get to present their work at the conference, where the winner will be chosen by the ETel audience. And cash prizes, too. The winner will receive $1,500, with second and third place getting $1,000 and $500.
A telephony mashup is a voice, Web or mobile application (PBX, IVR, VOIP, SMS, Text Messaging, etc.) that combines content from more than one source to create a new user experience. Qualifying entries must demonstrate how an application can use one or more sources of content in an inventive way to benefit users. Any tool or platform that involves content (see StrikeIron or ProgrammableWeb) telephony (ex: VOIP, SMS, Text Messaging, PBX, IVR) can be used to create a mashup. This is uncharted territory, so there is plenty of room to use your imagination!!
The first round of the contest is open to all developers. Mashup submissions must be made by Feb 20th when finalists will be chosen. The contest is timed to conclude on the first day of the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference where finalists will demonstrate their mashup at the conference. The winner will be chosen by conference attendees.
This sounds like it will be a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with. There’s still time to register for our Emerging Telephony conference, being held February 27 - March 1, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. Check out the great line-up of speakers and sessions covering the cutting edge of communications.
Here are a couple of posts over on O’Reilly’s new Hackszine site that may be of interest to ETel readers. Jason Striegel takes a look at some actual costs involved in transferring very large chunks of data (courtesy of Jeff Atwood’s The Econimics of Bandwidth) and comes to the realization that the good old sneakernet can still make economical sense when we’re talking about moving terabytes of data around.
Jeff Atwood posted a great article on the economics of bandwidth the other day. He puts some current cost figures towards Jim Gray’s 2003 ACM interview, in which Jim describes the efficiencies of packing and shipping a whole computer instead of copying a terabyte of data over the net.
According to Jeff’s calculations, the effective sneakernet transfer rate for a terabyte of data is about 9.1 MBps at $0.06/GB. Only an OC-3 would be faster, which costs roughly $0.15/GB for both the sending and receiving end. Want to send 2 terabytes of data? Factoring in the extra time to copy to and from the disk, it works out to about 14.6 MBps at about the same cost per GB. Sneakernet scales.
And Brian Jepson takes a look at his unwired home and decides that thanks to the increased bandwidth requirements that online video will require, it’s time to run some new wired connections.
So over the past week, we’ve been punching holes in the walls, and my 1000ft spool of Cat5 cable arrived over the weekend. I never thought I’d be wiring my house, but here I am, doing just that. Now I understand why the Xbox 360 WiFi adapter is an optional item.
I will be covering 3GSM for ETel this year. My schedule is still fairly open, so if you’d like to meet up, drop me a line (email hint: first name at last name dot net).
Brian McConnell introduces the latest development project in his ongoing attempts to make websites accessible in many languages. The Worldwide Lexicon is an open source RSS and wiki translation service built using Ruby on Rails. Learn all about this exciting new project in Brian’s new ETel article, The Worldwide Lexicon Reloaded.
Slashdot points today to this collection of gripes about the state of the Symbian smartphone OS from developers and mobile executives, including some very negative comments attributed to higher-ups within Nokia. There’s also an interesting discussion about the Symbian variations being put into play by NTT DoCoMo, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, who are all developing their own proprietary and incompatible middleware packages to run on top of the mobile OS, and one developer makes the point that Symbian is really more like an OS kernel than an OS today, and there isn’t actually a stable Symbian OS that is compatible across the vendor platforms.
One developer writes, “In most regards, Symbian’s reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it’s probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it’s mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.
This post with all of its colorful reader comments about Symbian is a follow-up to an earlier roughlydrafted.com article on Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn’t Symbian, which is also worth a read.
The subject line is unfortunately untrue, because I would have had a serious talk with a spammer before allowing him to publish a document as disjointed as the following:Subject: Andy Oram has made great efforts at transforming my early ramblings into something actually worth printing.
This is not to say that I’ve never received a manuscript in as sorry a state as that excerpt, but I put it through several filters before releasing it. I certainly counsel my authors to indicate much earlier the point of their submission, which in the case of this email is a recommended stock pick.shows all major networks Outta Lynwood is an extremely guiltyand you’ll discover that this man isn’t just a smart-ass, but one really smart guy.I’d love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right nowIn its entirety, Straight downloads now in Y! Music’s TV Wants You. that was the best career choice for me.Reality Train cars derail, catch fire…
In what sounds like a bid to work together to continue to keep their network and services closed there are rumors online that many of the major European network operators are planning meetings together next week at the 3GSM conference.
The discussions are supposedly around attempting to collaborate on building a mobile phone search engine. If any of this is true it certainly sounds like another way that network operators are searching, no pun intended, to increase their bottom line through limiting the offerings to consumers, developers and potentially advertisers.
It’s not surprising that the carriers are taking proactive steps to attempt to disallow internet search giants from disrupting potential future revenue. Unfortunately, I’m guessing they will do more harm than good to their own cause. Through fighting off threats by keeping their network closed they will eventually turn off consu
