Content Partnering to Supercharge 3G Growth

Content Partnering to Supercharge 3G Growth

Summary

Background

Analysis

Recommendations

Authors

Subject: Wireless Industry: Communications

Date: June 2005

3G networks are gearing up in Europe, making that region the global testing-ground for a new type of relationship between operators and content providers. From networks to handsets, 3G service components are being developed, integrated and optimized in readiness for take-off. However, amid the pre-launch rush, one key question is possibly being overlooked: where is the money? By the end of 2005, shareholders will be demanding proof of incremental revenue and usage flowing from 3G handsets.

As attention turns to the commercial potential of high-speed mobile services based on 3G technology, the omens are not encouraging. Publicly-available information suggests that the early levels of mobile data usage at the interim 2.5G level are far from satisfactory. Despite the fact that the new 3G services are reported to be capturing customers’ imagination, there is little sign so far of them capturing a huge share of wallet. Figures to date suggest that the majority of users are not yet touching their 3G button—and that the ones that do press it are generating just a few dollars per user per month.

One place where European and US operators might look for lessons is Asia. Operators in Japan and Korea worked out how to make money from data some time ago and now generate approximately 100 percent more revenue per customer from mobile data than their European counterparts. But the main difference between these operators, apart from cultural distinctions, is the nature of this revenue. While the majority of data revenue in Europe derives from messaging (80-85 percent), in Asia content and applications make up the majority (60-70 percent).

While "content is king" remains the mantra in mobile data, the way this has manifested itself in Asia—via thousands of different content creators and in a continuously changing format—is far removed from the original expectations. It also differs sharply from the market in Europe, where mobile content's limited scope and depth has prevented it from competing satisfactorily with TV and the Internet. Operators in Asia typically have commercial relationships with around 1,000 selected content providers—and this broad provider base helps to keep competition alive and get the best content ideas to market.

However, European operators report that effectively managing thousands of content providers is operationally impossible, meaning that much of the effort they put into promoting open competition for content was, in fact, wasted. So what really sets the Asian operators apart is that they have managed to execute their original business plans, offering the most compelling developer experience to the mass market.

Based on interviews with a number of content providers and operators, Accenture has identified four areas in which an operator must develop outstanding capabilities to attract the best third-party providers. These four capabilities, illustrated in Figure 1, are:

1. Design/Test 2. Operate 3. Commercial 4. Support

While an operator would need to be world-class in all these capabilities to meet every conceivable third-party requirement, in practice it needs to make a pragmatic assessment of what developers expect from it—and invest accordingly.

1: Design/Test—Up to now, most service design has been focused around SMS, MMS and WAP standards. With the advent of Java technologies on high-capability handsets and faster mobile IP networks, developers now want better Service APIs and Development Kits to complete their offerings. 3G operators take two main approaches to selling content—either acting as an aggregator via a central repository, or providing developers with guidelines and xHTML templates.

The development of a new mobile content site takes from one to four months. To shorten this cycle, several operators are providing Development APIs to give third-party content providers greater flexibility in areas such as charging mechanisms and controlling access to content.

2: Operate—Many developers cite the lack of any clear organizational structure as a major drawback in their relationships with operators. Another common headache is the legal/contractual wrangling required before joining a large 3G operator’s development community, while 3G operators themselves face the challenge of integrating third parties into their own real-time billing systems.

Providers and partners also expect a steady testing environment, access to representative production data and responsiveness in the event of operational problems. However, most operators are currently failing to provide developers with clearly-defined service levels—despite this being standard practice in the fixed phone world.

3: Commercial—Developers’ commercial expectations could not be greater—and their impact to date could not be more disappointing. Developers would welcome the introduction of more flexible business models with fair revenue-sharing. Not surprisingly, developers would also like to see flawless charging−billing–payment−settlement flows so they receive their hard-earned money as quickly as possible. Operators should come up with a portfolio of billing models and give their providers the flexibility they need to match their specific offering with the most suitable model.

4: Support—Most developers expect some support for their own development activities. The availability of SDKs and well-documented material will prove adequate for most of their activities. However, they would also like to get in-depth management information capabilities, such as SLA Tracking or KPI Reporting. Such information allows them to develop services geared to specific target customer segments. Certainly, many operators could improve on their capabilities in this area, and Accenture research shows that the market is now waking up to the importance of doing so.

Bottom-line Benefits

In the introduction to this article, we asked: “where is the money?” As we have shown, while pulling all these capabilities together for third parties is neither cheap nor easy, it is worth the investment. For operators looking to grow their revenues and build market share, a roadmap to acquire the right partnering capabilities is not just a good-to-have—it’s a prerequisite for future success.

Tunc Yorulmaz is an associated partner in Accenture’s Communication & High Tech group, based in the London office.

Philippe Delaide is a partner in Accenture’s Communication & High Tech group, based in the Paris office.

Jean-David Benassouli is a manager in Accenture’s Communication & High Tech group, based in the Paris office.

Simone Maggi is a consultant in Accenture’s Communication & High Tech / CRM group, based in Sophia Antipolis.

Return to Summary

©1996-2005 Accenture All Rights Reserved

U.S. teenagers prefer instant messaging to connect with each other

Teen survey: E-mail is, like, so yesterday U.S. teenagers prefer instant messaging to connect with each other

News Story by Reuters

JULY 28, 2005 (REUTERS) - E-mail is for grown-ups, as U.S. teenagers now prefer instant messaging to communicate with each other online, according to a survey released yesterday by the nonprofit Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Internet users from 12 to 17 years old say e-mail is best for talking to parents or institutions, but they are more likely to fire up instant messaging when talking with each other, the survey found.

While e-mail is still used by 90% of online teens, the survey found greater enthusiasm for IM. Three-quarters of teen Internet users use instant messaging, compared with 42% of adults, Pew said. Nearly half of teens said they exchanged IMs daily, and some said they spent more than two hours each day using instant messenger programs.

Half or nearly half of the 1,100 teenagers surveyed said they use IM to send Web links or photos to each other, while nearly one-third said they had sent music or video clips. Adults were much less likely to do any of those things, the survey found.

Nearly nine out of 10 teenagers said they use the Internet, up from 74% in 2000. Those who are still not online are likely to be so poor that they have limited access to technology, the survey found, and are disproportionately minorities.

The survey, conducted in October and November 2004, has a margin of error of four percentage points.

A virtual vault for personal data

Note synchro with phones and auto-format ====== A virtual vault for personal data

By Michael Kanellos http://news.com.com/A+virtual+vault+for+personal+data/2100-1046_3-5796996.ht ml

Story last modified Wed Jul 20 15:09:00 PDT 2005

PALO ALTO, Calif.--EverNote has come up with a catch-all personal database for your computer aimed at helping you keep, and search for, items you don't want to lose.

Users can insert PowerPoint slides, handwritten notes from a tablet PC, photos, passwords, e-mails or fragments of Web pages into the EverNote database. The system then synchronizes so that the data is automatically replicated on all the cell phones, PCs or other devices in your personal network.

Later, if you search for a term, the database will pull up all of the documents, regardless of file format, containing that term. A single query on "Gates" on EverNote CEO Stepan Pachikov's phone produced a handwritten note, a few pictures, a few e-mails and some Web links. Consumers can also insert recorded voice messages into the database, but they can't be searched for yet.

"This is a database for everything you would like to remember," Pachikov said during an interview at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University. "People dream of having a photographic memory." "This is a database for everything you would like to remember." --Stepan Pachikov CEO, EverNote

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is one of several new start-ups in the "Your Data Anytime" category. These companies are effectively trying to sell technology that will allow consumers to access their personal files through any device. Orb Networks, for example, sells an application that lets an individual with a cell phone tap into pictures, videos or music stored on a remote home computer.

Some venture capitalists express doubts about whether these companies--most of which have to give at least a basic version of their software to attract customers--will be able to thrive. Nonetheless, the idea is attracting attention, and many of the companies are landing funding.

EverNote differs from others in the category in that the data isn't accessed remotely. The information inside the database is replicated on each device during the automatic synchronization process. The data is altered to suit the device: hefty 5MB photos, for instance, are stored as a 53K file on a phone.

The EverNote database, however, is only designed to hold a person's most valuable documents. Users don't put everything in it: only the stuff they really want to keep. Pachikov, who once worked as a supercomputing scientist in the Soviet Union and sold a company to Silicon Graphics in 1997, had 1,061 items in his database. Orb and other services can connect consumers to the whole hard drive or a live TV feed.

So far, approximately 150,000 people have downloaded the application from the company's Web site. A premium version can be bought as well. Microsoft, Google duke it out for China Investors see green in clean tech Broadband's bargain hunt Staking claims for patent gold When technology is a distraction Previous Next

In the future, the company hopes to link up with cellular carriers to promote the technology. Cell phone carriers are now trying to find applications for the technological capabilities on today's phones.

EverNote, Pachikov asserts, could help turn the cameras now included in phones into something more than a consumer feature. He uses it at conferences to take pictures of people and their name tags so he can remember them later. The pictures are automatically given a time and location stamp.

"The phone is like a hand scanner," he said. "I would like to use it as a universal recorder."

Copyright C1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

V3RT entertain - fox and hound

http://www.culturehole.com/blog_commento.asp?blog_id=14

 In brief: One guy named Mr. X runs around Toronto’s transit system in a bright yellow shirt, while three or more guys in red shirts try to find him using the clues he gives at every third stop he makes. The three detectives are coordinated by dispatchers who tell the detectives where they think Mr. X might be and how best to block him off. Mr.X’s dispatcher is relaying information about the detectives whereabouts and tries to keep him away from them. The game ends when a time limit has been reached or X is caught.

You need:
• A fully charged Cell phone with unlimited weekend minutes
• A Monthly or Day Pass for the TTC
• Sunscreen

Here are the rules: Scotland Yard is played by 6 or more people, half of the players are in the field, and the other half are dispatchers. Teams are paired up, one dispatcher with a field agent. Each pair is in contact with each other using a cell phone. One agent in the field is chosen to be “Mr. X” while the rest are detectives.

The object: As Mr. X, you must avoid capture for a determined amount of time (3 or 4 hours), As a detective, you have to capture Mr. X (optionally cuff, rough-up, interrogate and incarcerate) through team play and coordinated efforts before time runs out. Dispatchers are the people who will strategize and coordinate your efforts in the field.

To start the game: Mr. X is randomly placed at a stop and must phone into HQ to tell his dispatcher what 3 methods of transportation he will be using on his next three moves (subway, streetcar, bus). To stand out from the crowd, Mr. X must wear his yellow “X” shirt. Detectives must wear the red “D”. (These striking shirts are provided)

How to move: Both Mr. X and the detectives will utilize Toronto’s public transit system during the game. Mr. X is limited to the transportation provided on the map, however the detectives may freely move about the playing field in any way they see fit. (This rule may change depending how the game flows.)

Going from one stop to an adjacent stop is called a move. 3 moves consists of a turn. At the beginning of every turn Mr. X must phone into HQ to tell his dispatcher what 3 methods of transportation he will be using on his next three moves and in what order. At every second turn (6 moves) Mr. X must reveal his location as he enters that location. Mr. X’s dispatcher must tell the detective’s dispatchers this information, who in turn tell the detectives. The detectives locations known by Mr. X at all times.

Mr. X is given 1 black ticket with which he may make one bonus move in secret. This will be used at any time, and doesn’t need to be declared at the beginning of his turn.

When travelling by subway Mr. X must skip one subway stop for it to be considered a move. This gives the advantage of allowing Mr. X to travel greater distances in less moves, and skip by detectives, e.g.. Mr. X may travel from 47 to 35 by subway in one move but may not go from 44 to 37 in one move). All other transportation moves as expected. Be careful on the weekends as there may be longer waits between buses and streetcars. Usually no longer than 20 minutes though.

The DetailsMr. X may not leave the platform, station, or TTC boundary by any other means than the transportation declared. Mr. X may not deviate from his declared plan.

When outdoors, the boundary is set by the stops them selves. An imaginary line is drawn around the corner stops, or subway entrances on each intersection. Failing this, a boundary the size of a soccer field would be appropriate.

Mr. X must stay in this area in open view, but if discovered, may run, jump, deke out, hide or whatever is necessary, in order to avoid his captures. If Mr. X gets on his declared transport before being tagged, the detective may not follow him, and can either follow on foot or wait for the next one. BE CAREFUL OF TRAFFIC AND SUBWAY TRAINS! Once Mr. X is tagged or the time expires the game is over.

'Write once, run anywhere' not working for phones

'Write once, run anywhere' not working for phones By Ben Charny, CNET News.com 15/7/2005 URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/communications/0,39044192,39243407,00.htm

When it was first introduced, Sun Microsystems' Java software for cellular phones was supposed to let developers write a single program that could run on any handset.

A half decade later, Sun's Java for cell phones, called the mobile information device profile, or MIDP, is used in half the world's 1.4 billion phones for downloading other bits of software. But writing a program that can run on any handset still isn't possible.

It's an odd by-product of Java's success in the cell phone market. Ironing out the details of software such as the MIDP takes time, and neither the cell phone makers nor service providers have been willing to wait as they pump out the 700 million or so cell phones sold each year.

Instead, Nokia, Motorola and other handset makers have built devices using their own fixes for MIDP.

Though that's understandable, since they have to deal with the immediate needs of the market, their actions have played a major role in sullying the "write once, run anywhere" promise of MIDP, say Sun executives and developers of cell phone software. That means that the extra costs and development time associated with creating multiple versions of the same software find their way into nearly every corner of the cell phone industry, from the price of handsets to the price for downloading a ring tone.

"Fragmentation is the one major roadblock that could mean the difference between success and failure for developers embracing this market," Allen Lau, the chief technology officer at Tira Wireless, wrote in an article in the trade publication Java World.

What was billed as an oasis for developers has turned into quicksand, quipped developers attending Sun's recent JavaOne confab in San Francisco. None were louder than representatives of Nokia, which sells about a third of the world's cell phones, nearly every one with Java inside.

"Defragmentation remains a major issue," Nokia Chief Technology Officer Pertti Korhonen said during a recent speech to Java developers. "We need to reduce the fragmentation effect because interoperability is critical for today's mass market devices. We need to simplify the standard, and use open, fair and predictable licensing terms for the technology."

Though the cell phone industry has made tremendous strides in the last two years, it's becoming clear to engineers at Sun that the ultimate goal of "write once, run anywhere" may never be fully realized because the cell phone market is simply too diverse, said Eric Chu, a Sun senior director who played a role in much of the early MIDP development.

Sun's efforts to end the fragmentation problems have so far come up short. Just about every year the company has had another way to attack the problem. The latest attempt involves the Java Verified program, which was created several months ago to certify cell phone software and ensure that it runs on different companies' phones.

It's a radical change from past practices, when applications had to be tested by each handset maker in order to ensure the coding was bug-free and at a certain quality level. But it's too early to say how well the new program is working.

Great promise, mixed results The MIDP standard, based on Java 2 Micro Edition, or J2ME, was developed collaboratively by Sun and more than 20 cell phone companies. The goal was to provide the cell phone industry with a

standard for downloading software onto phones, one that would allow a single version of any application, be it a three-dimensional game or instant messaging, to work on any phone.

Fragmentation issues surfaced quickly. The initial version of MIDP had a limited set of built-in features, so if handset makers wanted to, for instance, add 3D gaming, they had to build their own way of doing so into the handset. So a 3D game built to run on, say, a handset made by Motorola, wouldn't operate appropriately on a handset from Nokia.

Meanwhile, hardware makers were busy producing cell phones that were like snowflakes: No two were alike. Some had huge screens and tiny dial pads, others just the opposite. Application makers have had to account for the nuances or risk severely limiting the reach of their products.

Essentially, that means developers have had to do something different to their software to fit each different phone. Writing multiple versions of software can mean adding months of additional work on a program.

"It can take up to nine months to deploy an entertainment application," said Craig Hayman, vice president of carrier marketing at IBM. "But that's the duration of a cell phone in this market."

Sun, Nokia and others are still trying to deal with the issue. MIDP is now on its second version, one that accounts for just about any feature customers might want on a handset, so there's less of a need for proprietary software, Chu said.

There's also a movement afoot to standardize the ways in which different features on phones work together, Chu said. The proposed standard, known as MSA, or Mobile Service Architecture, is meant as an adjunct to MIDP, according to the handset makers and carriers that support the idea.

But don't expect the problems to go away anytime soon.

"You can look at (MIDP) as a problem, or at the incredible progress so far," said Jason Guesman, vice president of Seven, a Redwood City, Calif., wireless messaging specialist that competes with the likes of Research in Motion and Good Technology. "It's amazing what you can do now, thanks to Java, with a US$99 handset. But write once, run anywhere isn't close."

Asian developer maps software to location services

Asian developer maps software to location services By Aaron Tan, ZDNet Asia 7/7/2005 URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,39241536,00.htm

SINGAPORE--An Asian software company has developed a new application for accessing location-based services on Symbian-based cellphones.

Called NavFone, the software was developed by agis, a Singapore-based company. Users can download it from the company's Web site and install it on cellphones like the Nokia 6600 and 6630, said Poon Kim Ying, agis' chief technology officer.

Available since April this year for about S$30 (US$17.71) per copy, the software includes a directory map of the island-state, together with addresses of places such as restaurants, banks, roads, malls and churches. So far, more than 1,000 copies of the software have been sold, Poon said.

With NavFone, a cellphone user is able to locate a restaurant within the vicinity or search for a building by entering its name--similar to how users perform a Google search. "It's like having a street directory and Yellow Pages with you on your mobile phone," said Poon.

To make it easy for NavFone users to download new and updated information from the Web site, agis embedded all information, such as restaurant locations, in "layers" that sit on top of the map. This makes it easy to create layers for new classes of information, such as bus stops, and to update existing ones with new data.

The software also enables mobile phone users to pinpoint their physical locations when they are indoors. To do this, NavFone retrieves information from the individual cells on a GSM cellular phone network to determine where the phone is.

Poon said this gives the software an advantage over GPS (global positioning system) solutions, which typically require users to be outdoors. Also, users may not be willing to pay for GPS receivers that cost around S$200 (US$118) each, he added.

Another notable application is taxi-booking, which enables users to book a taxi with Singapore cab operator Comfort Transportation by highlighting a taxi pickup point on the map. In 30 seconds, a text message will be sent to the user with the estimated waiting time, together with the taxi license plate number, Poon explained.

NavFone took a year to develop and at a cost of S$500,000 (US$295,200). The project received funding support from the Infocomm Development Authority, but agis did not disclose the amount.

Poon said there are plans to partner with banks and malls to "push" information on retail promotions to mobile phones users whenever they reach a targeted location.

agis is in talks with Singapore mobile operators to market the software to cellphone users. The company is also planning to introduce NavFone in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and Australia.

TagCloud

A neat idea in the tagging area...

 

==============

 http://www.tagcloud.com/

Welcome to TagCloud.com

What is TagCloud?

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

TagCloud lets you create and manage clouds with content you are interested in, and let's you publish them on your own website.

Sound Interesting?

Lots of other people think so too. The technology behind TagCloud.com was created just for fun by IonZoft developer John Herren, and word quickly spread through the blogosphere. After numerous requests for his source code, we decided to produce this service based on John's original idea.

Discussing presence and IM futures

 

=======

 

6/22/2005

Microsoft: There's more to presence than whether someone is online or not

-Posted by David Berlind @ 2:24 pm 

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If there's one application that just about every computer user in the world (and now, many handset users) makes use of, it's instant messenging.  By Microsoft's estimates, there are over a quarter of a billion people in the world engaging in some form of instant messaging today and the fact that a real time communications application like IM has gotten that big without experiencing any really serious growing pains is not just a testimony to its scalability, but to our need to have not just information at our fingertips, but people as well.

One benefit of instant messenging that many people rely on is something called presence.  With today's instant messenging clients, we can glean certain information about our what our contacts are up to at any given moment.  Are they online, or present? Is their system idle (indicating that they're away from their desk)? If so, are they still present on the instant messenging network, but just via a mobile handset? In addition to our contact's IM aliases — aka "screen names" — what are their real names and phone numbers? Not only that, but today's free IM clients from Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL don't seem to ever be resting on their laurels.  Already, we can initiate VoIP phone calls, video conferences and whiteboard conferences with multiple people simultaneously and more functionality (for example photo sharing) is always on the way. 

In the meantime, even though many businesspeople rely on the public forms of IM, vendors like IBM and Microsoft are trying to convince businesses that their real-time collaboration solutions — solutions that typically require the installation of special behind-the-firewall infrastructure — make it plainly evident that there's so much more to presence than what the public networks have to offer.  The result, these vendors argue, is that businesses can be more efficient at everything thing they do and somehow, that could contribute to the bottom line (although that actual hard dollar contribution is hard to quantify). 

Earlier today, I gave Microsoft's group product manager for real-time collaboration Ed Simnett the opportunity to make his case for why organizations that rely on public messaging clouds should be thinking about taking the application in house by using products like Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) and the company's very recently released Office Communicator 2005: the Windows-based client that users would use to not only connect to an LCS server, but also reveal many more details (including calendar data and whether their on the phone or not) about other people who are connected to the "private cloud" as well as to communicate with external users who still operate in one of the major public clouds such as AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo IM (yes, Microsoft's client integrates other IM clients).  In a quick and dirty test, Simnett and I freely IMed each other while he was on the Microsoft client and I was on AOL, although it did take a while before his original request to "intrude" on my buddy list was received.

As you can hear from the interview (available as an MP3 that can be downloaded or, if you’re already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of audio podcasts, it will show up on your system or MP3 player automatically. See ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in), there are other reasons to put some sort of real-time collaboration infrastructure in place.  For example, organizations such as ones in the healthcare of financial industries — which must keep a virtual paper trail or ensure that all communications are encrypted (with no chance for circumvention) — can use a centralized infrastructure like LCS to handle such background tasks. 

Another scenario is where the private cloud is extended to include business partners or other relevant constituencies.  If you have to contact someone who's outside of your organization but in your supply chain, you might be able to gather rich presence information on them as well, provided they're running the same vendor's real-time infrastructure you are.  If they're not, some bare-bones integration between dissimilar real-time collaboration infrastructures is possible through protocols like SIP and Simple, but some of the  rich presence data may be lost.  During the interview, Simnett talks about how this barrier to integration will be overcome at some point in the future through the use of Web services and XML documents that essentially allow real-time collaboration systems to export their presence data.  Toward the end of the interview, Simnett talks about the recently released Web client for LCS as well as one that will ship near year's end so that that connected Windows Mobile devices such as PocketPCs can also tap into a Microsoft-based "presence backbone."

The joys of GPRS configuration

Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:54:04 +1000 From: "Darryl Smith" <Darryl@radio-active.net.au> Subject: SIM Cards with GPRS

I am a GPS tracking consultant - and I usually use GPRS, which is a packet switched data service built on top of GSM. Unlike AMPS and CDMA, the personality of each mobile device is stored in a Smart Card called a SIM card. This stores the local encryption key as well as a serial number that points to your phone number. It also stores information on the preferred GSM network to connect to and your phonebook.

If you want to swap phones you just swap SIM cards. This makes upgrading phones really easy, and also makes it easy to rent a phone in another country if your phone does not work in that country because it operates on a different frequency.

One of my clients was issued 80 SIM cards for a project I was doing for them. The carrier supplied the SIM cards as well as printed documentation listing the serial number for each card. This serial number is the reference that translates into a phone number and a billing identifier.

This customer also arranged to have their own VPN set up so that their data traffic would not pass over the internet but over a private link between the carrier and customer. The way this is done is by assigning a different APN or Access Point Name. This APN was specific to this customer, and no-one else had access to it.

When I was testing the equipment with the SIM cards and the custom APN, the SIM cards would not work. So I tried it in my GPRS phone - and strangely it worked using the standard APN. This did not surprise me as the carrier was notorious for not correctly configuring the APN.

My customer then sent the list of SIM cards to the carrier for them to fix, attaching the custom APN. This was the same list the carrier had provided to them, but thanks to business processes it was easiest for my client to e-mail the carrier the list back. The changed the APN on all 80 cards to the custom APN, removing GPRS access through the default APN to all cards.

24 hours later I tried the equipment again, and it still did not work. So I rang my client, and for a joke I told him the serial number of the SIM card, and asked him if it was on his list. I was rather surprised when he could find no reference of it. Comparing his list of serial numbers to my list of serial numbers, we worked out that only 3 out of 80 of the SIM cards were on his list.

So my client then contacted the carrier. After some discussions, the carrier then transferred the 77 SIM cards to my client, and presumably restored the correct APN to the other 77 SIM cards being used by other clients returning GPRS functionality.

What had happened is that the carrier did not provide the correct SIM Serial Numbers to my client in the first place. My client assumed that this list was correct. I did not care what the serial numbers were, but I recorded them on each piece of equipment anyway, copying the number from the cards themselves, rather than copying from his list.

Then my client, assuming his list was accurate e-mailed the carrier, and the carrier assumed that this list was correct. And then changed the SIM cards to 'Fix Them', breaking many other services at the same time. Management in the carrier took some time to be convinced that they had not issued the correct serial numbers to the client - even wanting to speak to me directly to verify that I physically had these SIM cards in my possession.

Right now my clients GPRS devices seem to be working, but I have no idea about the 77 SIM cards being used by other clients. This is likely to be a huge billing nightmare too. Thankfully we only used a few cents worth of GPRS bandwidth on cards that did not (at the time) belong to my client.

The risk? Don't rely on information that a supplier gives you. Do not rely on information a customer gives you without cross checking it. Do not rely on mobile devices for critical purposes if there is any chance that someone could re-configure your mobile device.

Darryl Smith, VK2TDS, POBox 169 Ingleburn NSW 2565 Australia +61 4 12 929 634 www.radio-active.net.au/blog/ www.radio-active.net.au/web/tracking/

SunPage offers mobile calls at under 6 cents

Kewl. Somebody figured out how to arbitrage free incoming mobile phone calls!

Business Times - 21 Jun 2005

SunPage offers mobile calls at under 6 cents

By ROLAND LIM

MOBILE phone users are being offered a new service which allows them to make calls at 5.9 cents per minute, compared to the 10 to 21 cents charged by conventional mobile operators.

The service, called Budget MobileCall or BMC, was launched yesterday by SunPage Communications, a subsidiary of mainboard-listed TeleChoice International.

The system involves a user ringing and then being called back, so it takes around seven seconds to make a connection, rather than the usual two seconds.

BMC only benefits users with a mobile phone plan which has free incoming calls.

This is still a big market, according to Clive Lim, president of TeleChoice, who estimates that 'about 40 per cent of the post-paid market, or about a million subscribers, have mobile phone plans with free incoming calls'.

He said yesterday: 'We are targeting a different market from the major telcos, and are going after the lower-end, budget conscious market.'

SunPage currently has 85,000 subscribers registered with its post-paid international direct dialling (IDD) service, who will automatically be registered for this service.

'We aim to add up to 20,000 new subscribers for BMC by the end of this year,' said Danny Lai, managing director of ST SunPage. BMC subscribers will be billed separately from their respective mobile operator charges, on a per-minute basis.

'We also aim to achieve three million minutes per month by the end of the year, and 10 million minutes per month by the end of next year,' Mr Lai said.

For its first fiscal quarter ended March 31, TeleChoice reported revenues of $125 million, up 4 per cent from the same period last year.

Of this, $6.6 million, or about 5 per cent, came from its telecommunications services division, SunPage.

At three million minutes per month, SunPage's new service could add about half a million dollars to quarterly revenue.

The system works by the BMC subscriber dialling '15210', followed by the local number required.

This connects the user to SunPage's system where there will be a beeping tone and the call will be terminated.

There is no charge for this call as the system does not pick up the call.

A few seconds later, the system will call the user back, and upon answering, he or she will be connected to the dialled party.

Since last year, a few companies such as iCentel and OSMS International have offered similar products which allow mobile phone users to make calls at about five cents per minute using a similar call-back system.

Most of these offerings are based on pre-paid cards distributed using a multi-level marketing model.

imeem

Don't' know if I sent this one to you before - similar concept buy wired-world and no central store of data. They are also using the now popular "Huck Finn" method of only allowing people to join who are invited.

It is interesting that people see distributed data as an advantage - assuming that you can get past the first level of trust issue, central storage should be more secure than distributed. Visa is a good example of that architecture, where only pieces are ever distributed, and the whole record exists in one place only.

http://www.imeem.com/what.aspx

Outfoxed - social networking

[0]wanderingstan writes "[1]Outfoxed is my masters thesis project about trust. ([2]Nutshell overview) The extension uses a [3]social network for [4]personalized searching, [5]phishing/spyware protection, [6]file/process validation and more. It's related to [7]del.icio.us, [8]StumbleUpon, and those [9]Kevin [10]Bacon [11]things, but [12]goes a lot further. Mathematically, [13]it's based on the network behavior of [14]small world networks (pdf). [15]Built with Javascript, Python, SQL, and XSLT. [16]366 testers so far, but we need the network to grow!"

Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/06/20/1140221

Links: 0. http://www.wanderingstan.com/ 1. http://getoutfoxed.com/ 2. http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell 3. http://getoutfoxed.com/visualization 4. http://www.wanderingstan.com/getoutfoxed/search/search/search.py?p=travel 5. http://getoutfoxed.com/about/spyware 6. http://getoutfoxed.com/about/files 7. http://del.icio.us/ 8. http://www.stumbleupon.com/ 9. http://www.orkut.com/ 10. http://www.friendster.com/ 11. https://www.linkedin.com/ 12. http://getoutfoxed.com/compare 13. http://getoutfoxed.com/node/62 14. http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=4&q=http://www.siam.org/siamnews/11-01/ networks.pdf&e=9818 15. http://getoutfoxed.com/node/43 16. http://getoutfoxed.com/directory

Stealth Start-Ups Suck

http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000207.html

 

 

 

Stealth Start-Ups Suck

There's been a small rash (ouch, you should see a doctor about that...rimshot) of press coverage about the new stealth web start-up 24 Hour Laundry. Who knows what they do, but whatever it is, they're doing it wrong. Here's the thing, stealth mode for a web start-up is the kiss of death.

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. In many industries, creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort. During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in 3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

Why go fast? Many reasons:

• First mover advantage is important.
• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
• Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don't bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
• The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you'll start getting feedback from users.

Why is first mover advantage important? You get to define the space. Any future competition will be compared to you, which gives you continuous mindshare. Your service will become synonymous with the functionality you provide. Now, there are caveats to this. Neither ONElist nor Bloglines were exactly first in their respective fields. But the competition had not gained critical mass and the core functionality of each competitor didn't work well.

Some people think that they need to stay in stealth mode as long as possible to protect their exciting new idea. I hate to break the news to you, but unless you're Einstein or Gallileo, your idea probably isn't new. I have this theory. The success of a web service is inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development. There are exceptions of course. But I also think this can be applied to other things. Segway, anyone?

Web services have many advantages over shipping software. You can continuously update the service, fix bugs and add new features. There are no long development cycles. Embracing this is a key to success. The first version (or several versions, probably) of any service you create is most likely going to suck. And that's ok. Your service won't scale to handle a lot of traffic. It will be missing a huge amount of functionality. It'll probably look bad. And it'll have bugs. All of this was true for both ONElist and Bloglines, but they both ended up reasonably ok. Because you can continuously update the service, you can deal with these issues.

One of the many great things about running a web service are the users. A passionate user is one of your greatest assets. And I would argue that the only thing of real value a web service has is its users. They act as advertising for you, telling all their friends about your service. They are the best source of new feature ideas. And they are the best Q.A. testers you can get. Most importantly, they're the gauge that tells you whether your service is actually useful or not (ie. is it worth losing years of your life continuing to develop and run it). By getting your service launched as quickly as possible, you'll get exposure to this wonderful resource sooner. By listening to your users as you add features and improve the service (because, remember, it won't be perfect at launch), your users feel like they are a part of the process. They start to have a sense of ownership of the service. Which reinforces their passion. And with the constant updates and fixes to your service, you're continually giving your users reasons to talk about you. Users are the one thing that your competition cannot copy and develop internally. Technology can be copied. Users have to be earned. One thing to remember, however, is that you need to be responsive to customer support, because that's one of the key ways to cultivate passionate users.

I'll end this rant now. I don't mean to single out 24 Hour Laundry, they're probably nice people. But they were the ones that reminded me of this. I could also rant on how you only need a couple of people to create a web service and that starting one doesn't require a lot of money (and oftentimes raising a lot of money actually screws things up). But I'll save those for another day. Posted by markf at June 16, 2005 06:56 AM

OutFoxed - social networking

[0]wanderingstan writes "[1]Outfoxed is my masters thesis project about trust. ([2]Nutshell overview) The extension uses a [3]social network for [4]personalized searching, [5]phishing/spyware protection, [6]file/process validation and more. It's related to [7]del.icio.us, [8]StumbleUpon, and those [9]Kevin [10]Bacon [11]things, but [12]goes a lot further. Mathematically, [13]it's based on the network behavior of [14]small world networks (pdf). [15]Built with Javascript, Python, SQL, and XSLT. [16]366 testers so far, but we need the network to grow!"

Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/06/20/1140221

Links: 0. http://www.wanderingstan.com/ 1. http://getoutfoxed.com/ 2. http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell 3. http://getoutfoxed.com/visualization 4. http://www.wanderingstan.com/getoutfoxed/search/search/search.py?p=travel 5. http://getoutfoxed.com/about/spyware 6. http://getoutfoxed.com/about/files 7. http://del.icio.us/ 8. http://www.stumbleupon.com/ 9. http://www.orkut.com/ 10. http://www.friendster.com/ 11. https://www.linkedin.com/ 12. http://getoutfoxed.com/compare 13. http://getoutfoxed.com/node/62 14. http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=4&q=http://www.siam.org/siamnews/11-01/ networks.pdf&e=9818 15. http://getoutfoxed.com/node/43 16. http://getoutfoxed.com/directory

Miranda IM

Another open source IM client released under the GPL.

-----------------------

[0]Eesh writes "The [1]Miranda project developers have recently posted to

their [2]development blog about two GPL violations of companies using

their code - [3]vBuzzer and [4]StarMessenger. Today, they also posted

that [5]vBuzzer are taking steps to correct that violation. Hopefully

this will work out fine. [6]Miranda 0.401 stable was released recently"

Discuss this story at:

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/06/19/1713208

Links:

0. http://eesh.net/

1. http://miranda-im.org/

2. http://blog.miranda-im.org/

3. http://blog.miranda-im.org/2005/06/18/vbuzzer/

4. http://blog.miranda-im.org/2005/06/19/starmessenger-rip-off/

5. http://blog.miranda-im.org/2005/06/19/vbuzzer-update/

6. http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=335037

Yahoo! User-created chat rooms are no longer available

You have to have moderation/policing to stop the chaos.  It is the law of entropy applied to information systems.

=============

 

 18 June 2005  Chatmag News.

Yahoo! User-created chat rooms are no longer available.  According to Yahoo's chat log in page:

"The ability to publish user-created chat rooms in the public Yahoo! Chat directory is currently unavailable. We are working on improvements to this service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service"

Yahoo! chat users can view this notice by logging in to Yahoo! Chat via your web browser, and navigating to the chat listings. Once in the listings, click on the "user rooms" link. A screen shot of this notice is available, click here.

In recent years, the Yahoo! chat rooms have been inundated by "ad bots", automated programs that deluge users with private messages containing links to commercial web sites. Online predators have also utilized the Yahoo! chat rooms, seeking children for real or online encounters.

Petitions to Yahoo! to create moderators, or chat room operators have been submitted to Yahoo!,  with no positive results from the Yahoo! staff.

Several online vigilante groups, most notably Perverted-Justice.com have also used the Yahoo! chat rooms seeking "wannabe" online predators, and in most cases, publishing transcripts of private conversations conducted within Yahoo! chat. The closure of the user created chat rooms will in effect stop Perverted-Justice.com from operating within Yahoo! chat.

This closure of the user created chat rooms is system wide, in all Yahoo! chat categories. No further information is available at this time.

--Chatmag News Staff--

Related Article:
Yahoo Chatters Irate.

External Links:

Chatmag's Discussion Forum.

Editorial. Changes Necessary at Yahoo! Chat.

Yahoo! Chat.

Yahoo Messenger Statement.

Investigation Shows Big Business Funding Sex Chat Rooms.

Irate Yahoo! Chatters Complain.

Slashdot Article.

Operators are not marketing 3G correctly

Note quote from Montefiore... ============

Operators are not marketing 3G correctly By Gregory Teo, Special to ZDNet Asia 17/6/2005 URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/communications/0,39044192,39237166,00.htm

SINGAPORE--To get more users to try out their 3G services, most operators now price video call services close to their traditional voice rates. This fervor to pull in 3G customers have resulted in a lower average revenue per user (ARPU), a trend that should not be encouraged when better services are being provided for, say industry observers during the CommunicAsia conference held here this week.

James Fergusson, regional director of technology sector for research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres Singapore, said: "If you've got a good product, you don't sell it at a low price."

Fergusson believes that operators are making a mistake appealing to price-conscious customers such as students, the unemployed and low-income earners.

"To increase ARPU, we shouldn't appeal to people in the lower-income customer base", he said. Operators should instead be targeting big spenders such as white-collar professionals, he added. These include long distance daily commuters, users who want IT services that give them more convenience, and early IT adopters in the 20 to 50 age groups. Service providers, he noted, should not target teenagers.

Operators currently are not marketing effectively to user groups outside teenagers, he said. "Marketed correctly, 3G can increase operator ARPU," Fergusson said, but noted that operators are instead marketing 3G as a commodity, resulting in falling ARPU. However, high prices can also deter users from picking up 3G services, as one carrier has learnt.

Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo, priced its video call services 30 percent higher than its voice call charges. "Some say it is expensive and it's taking some time to take off," said Masayuki hirata, senior executive vice president and managing director of global business division, NTT DoCoMo.

Company officials are now engaged in an internal debate to resolve the issue, he said. The operator has also started a trial to offer some pre-selected users 3G services at lower rates, to determine if pricing is indeed a major barrier.

New billing models Jan Nilsson, president and COO of Far EasTone Telecommunications, noted that current pricing models for communications services "cannot support tomorrow's services".

Fergusson said that the utility or productivity aspects of a 3G service, which will make people willing to pay more, are not being marketed properly by operators. Such tools include location-based services and mobile e-mail capabilities, rather than video calls and downloading of music, he said.

Some applications, such as the music downloads are gimmicky while others provide more value to users, he noted, adding that user appeal will depend on the age group of the target audience.

Ferguson advised operators to offer applications that consumers want and need. He added that they should keep the number of service offerings small, and take care not to cannibalize on their existing voice business.

NTT DoCoMo's Hirata said: "Voice and e-mail are not sufficient as service offerings for 3G." He added that the next-generation network allows the operator to offer richer content, and customers have been using a growing amount of such content after the introduction of its iMode mobile Internet access service.

Neil Montefiore, CEO of MobileOne said: "Content is what draws customers." He explained that content owners must adapt to a customer's needs and create applications that fulfill to these needs. He added that content owners are traditionally slow to adapt.

M1 currently offers 3G video streaming services, but Montefiore said the Singapore-owned mobile operator will be launching more 3G content by the end of this year.

Hirata noted that new services are needed to increase the ARPU for 3G, which he said will not increase much because mobile penetration rates are much higher now than when 2G services were launched.

Gregory Teo is a freelance IT writer based in Singapore.

Who Will Google Buy Next?

Kuro5hin is running an article entitled Who Will Google Buy Next?, which features a list of all Google's previous buyouts and some interesting suggestions for the future." A Google-buyout betting pool seems in order.

Links: 0. http://www.kuro5hin.org/ 1. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/12/143721/743

Note comment about knocking up a chat client in 5 minutes...

 

This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/061305-web-services.html

Web services ready to rock mobile apps

By John Cox, Network World, 06/13/05

The stage has been set for Web services to start playing a vital role in mobile applications for enterprise networks.

Web service development tools are growing more sophisticated as wireless networks become more pervasive and powerful.

This combination will make it easier for enterprise network groups to tie together mobile clients with back-end applications and data.

The potential was illustrated at last week's annual TechEd conference in Orlando, where Microsoft announced the latest pre-beta release of Indigo, the next Windows communications framework for Web services. During a session devoted to Indigo, Microsoft's Ari Bixhorn, lead product manager for Web services, created a device-based chat application with Indigo in about 5 minutes. In another demonstration, an Indigo-based application, working with Microsoft's Media Center software, sent an alert to Bixhorn's PocketPC smartphone whenever his son turned the TV set to "The Jerry Springer Show."

Some pioneers aren't waiting for Indigo (the beta release is due this summer) to launch mobile applications that use Web services. But it means building from scratch many of the services Indigo will provide as callable class libraries, such as reliable messaging, transaction features and security

"You can do [a service-oriented architecture] without Indigo. And we did," says Furrukh Khan, associate professor at Ohio State University's college of engineering in Columbus. He led a team in creating a Web services architecture (see graphic), using Microsoft's earlier Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 software, for operating rooms at the OSU Medical Center.

He wouldn't do it again.

"You have a federation of Web services, that need security, reliable messaging, transactions and a lot of things besides simple HTTP," he says. "Almost all this was missing from WSE 2.0, which focused mainly on security. Indigo combines all this functionality into one unified model for SOA."

Khan's team is at work now replacing large chunks of custom written code with Indigo's class libraries.

As handheld devices gain still more powerful processors and more memory, and as wireless data nets offer greater throughput and reliability, Web services become increasingly attractive for enterprise users.

"We've not seen a lot of Web services in the field because of the cost and difficulty of getting persistent [cellular data] connections," says Douglas Giuliana, director of product development for Eleven Technology, a Cambridge, Mass., software company specializing in mobile applications for the consumer packaged goods industry. "But we're seeing interest growing as the cost of [General Packet Radio Service] offerings drop. Our customers have been talking with us about this."

"In the handheld device space, Web services enable customers to easily access pertinent information from wherever they are," Microsoft's Bixhorn says. "A delivery guy with a PocketPC application on a handheld 'calls' our MapPoint public Web service and gets directions to his next location."

With Web services, mobile devices no longer become a special integration problem.

"If I build a Web service on the backend, I don't have to build two versions of it, one for 'normal' clients and one for mobile clients," says James White, author of Java2 Micro Edition, Java in Small Things. Formerly with discount retailer Target, he's now an instructor for Intertech Training in Eagan, Minn.

"We were constantly going to the server guys and saying, 'How can we get these little clients to work with the servers?' Web services let the server guys implement business functions as they see fit. Then, the clients can deal with those functions as they see fit," he says.

That kind of simplicity can be seen at OSU Medical Center. The focus of the first Web services system, OR-Eye, was to pull patients' vital signs data from a proprietary network of monitoring equipment, store it and allow mobile and desktop clients to access it through a client application (written in Macromedia's interactive Flash FX2004) that calls the Web service directly, instead of going through an applications server or other middleware. The vital signs are displayed graphically in the Flash player and in numerical form. The mobile clients now can access the data from anywhere on the wireless LAN throughout the hospital.

Khan's team is exploiting this service with two new services, in various stages of deployment. OR-Med will let an anesthesiologist in the operating room use a client application to enter a drug name and intended dose for a given patient. A group of Web services will check for drug interactions, patient allergies and potential complications, then report the results back to the client. After the drug is administered, OR-Med can tap into the vital signs Web service and track a timeline of when the drug was given and the patient's reactions.

OR-Track will use radio frequency identification tags on a patient's wrist, and RFID readers connected to the hospital network to track patients. When a patient moves to a different location, from operating room to recovery, for example, the Web service will pop up the relevant forms to track each stage and each action.

This kind of virtuous circle of Web services interactions is one of its defining features and one of its strongest attractions. "The beauty of it is, once you've built a Web service, you have multiple applications that could use it," says Jim Hilt, manager of SOA at IBM Global Services in Armonk, N.Y. A trucking company might pull GPS data via a Web service from its cellular data carrier to feed location information to drivers. But the company's route planners and warehouse operators might use the same data, accessed easily via Web services protocols, in their own applications, he says.

Khan acknowledges that Web services can be very "chatty," taking up time and bandwidth, both of which are critical over wireless connections.

"It's really a matter of design," he says. "You can make them chatty. But you can [also] make them less chatty and more 'chunky.'" Chatty refers to how often the Web services talk to each other; chunky refers to the amount of data sent back and forth.

"You need to talk to a Web service very fast, get what you need quickly or give it what you have, and then release it quickly," Khan says. "You don't want to wait for it to do its work."

As mobile devices become ever more capable, they will not only "consume" Web services, but host or "expose" them, predicts Juval Lowry, principal with iDesign, a San Jose, Calif., consultant in software architecture and an expert in Microsoft .Net. "We'll be able to do things on those devices, such as peer-to-peer execution and collaboration."

Intertech's James White cautions users to be realistic. "We're finding that Web services are not rocket science," he says. "But a lot of [software] infrastructure is needed. For example, how do you register Web services in an enterprise registry? Who has access to that? Who's the real owner of the service?"

Finally, Web services standards still are "in pretty young and raw form," White says. "Things like naming conventions, registry standards and so on are all still emerging."

All contents copyright 1995-2005 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

ALONE IN A CROWD

ALONE IN A CROWD

Don't hang up! Those cell phones we see everywhere are no more or less than a desperate attempt to keep from being alone with ourselves in a vast, uncaring universe Advertisement St Xavier University By Louis Rene Beres. Louis Rene Beres is a professor in the political science department at Purdue University who cannot be reached by cell phone

June 12, 2005

I belong. Therefore I am.

This is the unheroic credo expressed by cell-phone addiction, a not-so-stirring manifesto that social acceptance is vital to survival and that real happiness is solely the privilege of mediocrity.

This largely undiagnosed techno-condition represents much more than a reasonable need to remain connected. After all, when one looks closely at these communications a clear message is delivered: Talking on a cell phone makes the caller feel more important, more valuable, less alone, less lonely.

At a time when "rugged individualism" has become a nostalgic myth in America, being witnessed in conversation with another--any other--is presumed to be absolutely vital. Certainly, the nature or urgency of the particular phone conversation is mostly irrelevant. In many readily observable cases the exchange consists of meaningless blather punctuated by monosyllabic grunts. There is no vital content here; certainly nothing to resemble a serious reflex of thought or feeling.

All that really matters is that the caller be seen talking with another human being and that the conversation push away emptiness and anxiety.

How sad. The known universe is now said to be about 68 billion light-years "across," and yet here, in the present-day United States, being seen on the phone--preferably while walking briskly with rapt inattention to one's immediate surroundings, including life-threatening car traffic or heavy rain--is a desperate cry to every other passerby: "I am here; I have human connections; I count for something; I am not unpopular; I am not alone."

The cell phone, of course, has not caused people to display such feelings. Rather, it is merely an instrument that lets us see what might otherwise lie dormant in a society of dreadful conformance and passionless automatism. Ringingly, it reveals that we have become a lonely crowd driven by fear and trembling.

There exists, as Freud understood, a universal wish to remain unaware of oneself, and this wish generally leads individuals away from personhood and toward mass society. Hiding what might express an incapacity to belong, trying to be a good "member," the anxious American soon learns that authenticity goes unrewarded and that true affirmations of self will likely be unpardonable.

Humans often fear ostracism and exclusion more acutely even than death, a personal calculus that is largely responsible for war, terrorism and genocide. It is small wonder, then, that something as harmless as a cell phone should now have become a proud shiny badge of group standing.

The inner fear of loneliness expressed by cell-phone addiction gives rise to a very serious and far-reaching social problem. Nothing important, in science or industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy can ever take place without some loneliness.

To be able to exist apart from the mass--from what Freud called the reconstituted "primal horde" or Nietzsche the "herd" or Kierkegaard the "crowd"--is notably indispensable to intellectual development and creative inquiry. Indeed, to achieve any sense of spirituality in life, one must also be willing to endure being alone.

All of the great religious leaders and founders sought essential meanings "inside," in seclusion, deep within themselves.

But personal sadness in America seems to grow more intense wherever communication is difficult and wherever fears are incommunicable. In one sense, cell-phone addiction is less an illness than an imagined therapy.

Ultimately, in a society filled with devotees of a pretended happiness, it is presumptively an electronic link to redemption.

But the presumption is all wrong.

Trying to fill some vacancy within themselves, the compulsive cell-phone users should now remind us of a revealing image from T.S. Eliot: They are the "hollow men," they are the "stuffed men," leaning together as they experience painful feelings of powerlessness. More than anything else, they fear finding themselves alone, and so they cannot find themselves at all.

The noisy and shallow material world has infested our solitude; upon all of us the predictable traces of herd life have now become indelible. Facing an indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse, we Americans seek both meaning and ecstasy in techno-connections.

But we discover instead that the way is cruelly blocked by an insipid mimicry and endless apprehension. Do we dare to disturb the universe, or must we continue to die slowly, prudently, always in responsible increments, without ever taking the chance of becoming fully born?

One conveniently forgets that life is always death's prisoner.

Yet, once we can come to grips with this liberating idea we can begin to take our numbered moments with more intense pleasure and with true confidence in ourselves as unique. For now only our self-doubt seems inexhaustible, but this is because we routinely look to others to define who we are and because we despair when we do not measure up to these manufactured definitions.

In a sense, the attraction of the cell-phone machine is derivative from our own machine-like existence, a push-button metaphysics wherein every decision and every passion follows a standardized and uniformly common pathway.

We believe that we are the creators of all machines, and strictly speaking, of course, this is correct. But there is also an unrecognized reciprocity here between creator and creation, an elaborate pantomime between user and used.

Increasingly our constructions are making a machine out of man. In an unforgivable inversion of Genesis, it now even appears that we have been created in the image of the machine.

Cell-phone addiction is merely the very visible symptom of a pervasive pathology. The underlying disease is a social order built upon nonsense, a literally mindless network of jingles, advertised meanings and ready-made ideas that deplores individuality and celebrates slogans.

Our American society has lost all sense of awe in the world.

Cell phones in hand, we talk on and on because we would rather not think, and we would rather not think because there is no apparent emotional or material payoff for serious thought.

Holding fast to our cell phones, our fondest wish is that we should soon become interchangeable. We should be careful what we wish for.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

 I was thinking about the applications that go with V3RT and came across this insight.  I totally agree with the guy, though somewhat sheepishly, since as a manager, I have promoted groupware.  I had a quick look at the Hula project he references, and it fits well with the idea of someone with a cell phone wandering around and staying in touch.  I always found the calendar on the Nokia hard to use, so something that flowed between the web and the phone instead of corporate Outlook to phone that exists now will appeal to individual users.  And will it get you laid?  A noble goal.

Groupware Bad
© 2005 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

---

15-Feb-2005 (tue); 8:21 PM

Today Nat announced this new calendar server project called Hula, and I've got a funny story about that.

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

Groupware BAD

See, there were essentially two things that killed Netscape (and the real answer is book length, so I'm simplifying greatly, but)

1. The one that got most of the press was Microsoft's illegal use of their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to destroy an existing market (web browsers) by driving the market price for browsers to zero, instantaneously eliminating something like 60% of Netscape's revenue. Which was, you know, bad.

2. But the other one is that Netscape 4 was a really crappy product. We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"

   To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

   And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix patch-release for 2.0: it was.)

Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.

Users GOOD

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

Ok, I said it was a funny story, but obviously that's not the funny part, unless sad is funny.

Anyway, I babbled at Nat along these lines for a while, predicting that, while I was sure that anyone he talked to in a corporation would tell him, "free groupware, yes, awesome!", there was really no reason to even bother releasing something like that as open source, because there was going to be absolutely no buy-in from the "itch-scratching" crowd. With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf. But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Calendars USEFUL

I said, instead of trying to build some all-singing all-dancing "collaboration server" where you're going to throw in all kinds of ridiculous line items like bulletin boards and task tracking and other shit, let's suppose you narrow your focus to just calendars.

The first thing you want to do is make it trivially easy for someone to publish their calendar, allowing other people to check their schedule (and, for example, know when our target user has classes, when he's planning on studying at a cafe, what nights he's thinking of going to a movie, and what concerts he intends on seeing). Right now people can do that by publishing .ics files, but it's not trivial to do so, and it's work on the part of other people to look at them. If it's not HTML hanging off our friend's home page that can be viewed in any browser on a public terminal in a library, the bar to entry is too high and it's useless.

Then the next thing you want is an invitation manager like Evite but that doesn't suck. Evite sucks because they're spammers, and because it's more important to them to put advertising in front of your eyeballs than to be useful, so the mail they send out doesn't actually include any information, in a lame-assed attempt to drive hits to their web site. So what you want next is a free replacement for Evite -- but more to the point, one that doesn't require any kind of server running anywhere.

And if it doesn't work with webmail, you've lost before you've even begun, so don't do something dumb like requiring a plugin. The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance.

And then Nat went back to whichever flyover state Novell is in, and a few days later he said to me, "wow, you really bummed me out, because the dozen other people I had talked to before you were all like, `a free groupware system, that's an awesome idea!' Then you depressed me, and I came back here and told the other guys what you had said, and they were all, `Oh, fuck. He's right.'"

Wait, was there a funny part? Ok, maybe not. Nevermind.

Convergence of mobile phone & photoblog

 http://naanooreen.blogsome.com/2005/05/

Convergence of mobile phone & photoblog

Filed under: General

A few weeks ago in Emerging Media class, a photoblog website Flickr was introduced to me. Eventhough I’ m very familliar with photoblogging through my own photoblog, Fotopages, Flickr is an interesting website since it enables users to post pictures directly from the handphone.

Digi LifeLogger

Digi is one of the telco providers in Malaysia. Their latest invention is the LifeLogger, a type of photoblog similar to Flickr but developed by a telco provider. Therefore, this type of product extension does uplift the ability of the network as well as increasing the brand equity. Owners of digital camera embedded cellular phones can now share their experience and information in a multimedia format when they subscribe to Digi. Digi enables them to directly upload pictures from the mobile phone.

They are actually creating a network community of a mobile phone users who could share their interest of taking photos with friends and family from all over the world. The company believes that more and more mobile phone users will opt for phones with mobile camera because of the modern lifestyle pressure from the environment. Users can uploads pictures to the web even when their on holidays and out of reach of the computers and internet. They don’t even need a separate digital camera.

The second version of the LifeLogger.com offers a unlimited data storage and more than 5,000 Digi customers have register to the service. LifeLogger is at the moment receiving approximately 30,000 photos in MMS format. Users could also join the forum in LifeBlogger to communicate and discuss among them.

My Thoughts
The convergence of the use of mobile phones with camera and photoblog website has in away assist us to be in touch with friends and love ones although we are half way around the globe from them. Apart from personal use, this type of technology can also be applied professionally where those for example in construction sites can take a picture of projects and send them straight to the company’s website to be viewed by others.

Nevertheless, this privilege should not be misuse for example in taking nude photos in beaches and also photos that may tarnish a person’s credibility or reputation and publish it in a public space such as the internet. All pictures taken should be with permission and not violate anyone’s privacy.

Some links to mobile phone privacy readings:

Going wireless: behavior and practice of new mobile phone users by L Palen, M Salzman, E Youngs

Privacy - Camera Phones - M/Cyclopedia of New Media

Sneaky Cameras by Chris Mc Leod

Privacy fears on phone cameras by Larissa Dubecki

Sensor turns cell phones into wireless Web servers

Sensor turns cell phones into wireless Web servers Nokia app uses Bluetooth technology to let users exchange personal pages on their mobile phones

By John Blau, IDG News Service June 09, 2005

With a new application developed by Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia (Profile, Products, Articles) users can create personal pages on their mobile phones complete with text and graphics and exchange these with other phones, essentially turning their handsets into wireless Web servers. The Nokia Sensor application uses short-range Bluetooth radio technology to exchange pages and share files between phones within a range of up to 10 meters.

When users download the application at www.nokia.com/sensor, they are given templates to build their own personal pages, according to Nokia spokeswoman Marika Kojo.

"This is a totally new way of communicating with people in the same location," he said. "You can check out people before you meet them in a bar or restaurant or wherever. It's very spontaneous."

It's also free communication.

A demo is available at: http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/sensor.

Nokia Sensor, which works only on Nokia products, is available for a number of models, including 3230, 6260, 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, and 7610.

Morse Code on Cellphones

http://spaces.msn.com/members/northrup/Blog/cns!1p00yRi0M6ucRfAaZwfw6XyQ!286.entry

03 JuneMorse Texter--now my dad can finally get a mobile phone

Seriously, my dad has been an engineer for like 30 years, and has never owned a mobile phone. For some reason, he hates that particular piece of tech. He loves ham radio, though. So, here ya go:

Morse Texter

After reading this and this and this I decided to knock up this dodgy prototype for Series 60 phones. Tap in some Morse code, and then send it as an SMS. Keys are:

• 1, 4, 7, or * - Dot
  
• 2, 5, 8, or 0 - Dash
  
• 3, 6, 9, or # - Space

• Left arrow - Dot
  
• Right arrow - Dash
  
• OK key - Space

• C key - Delete last letter
  
• Call/green key - Send as SMS

For a gap between letters, press space once. For a gap between words, press space a second time.

A man after me own heart - 3G needs help

 

Will the mobile industry ever learn? Customers call the shots, not industry or government....

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Don't hold your breath for 3G 02.06.05, 12.15 GMT, The Science Museum, London, UK I just had a meeting with a group of young people who brought back a flood of memories from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, when the UK population wanted commercial radio but the government of the day was wed to a BBC-only world. This resulted in offshore radio stations on trawlers 'illegally' transmitting commercial radio. The government and regulators were outraged, whilst the public and advertisers were delighted. The outcome? Commercial radio was legalised. Public action and opinion won the day! Next the UK population wanted Citizen Band radio but the government and regulators of the day were wed to strict control. So the public started shipping in and using 'illegal' equipment from the US. The outcome? A de facto Citizen Band was established that ultimately had to be legalised. Again public action and opinion won the day! During the same era the UK government demanded that all car radios be licensed. But the public refused and in a legal battle reminiscent of today's RIAA MP3 file-sharing wars, people were prosecuted for non-payment. The outcome? So many people refused to pay that the system collapsed and the government had to relent - and make all car and portable radios exempt. The power of public action won again! Today that history looks all so quaint and the battles so unnecessary, just like the censorship of the works of DH Lawrence et al. Relaxing the controlling regimes has instead seen a flourishing of creativity and technology that no one predicted 50 or even 20 years ago. And yet we still have industries and governments trying to dictate, trying to control and trying to limit what we can and cannot do. A long time ago I decided that all such attempts were futile and my approach to technology has been to give it to the users and stand back to just observe what they do. It is the only satisfactory model I have found for getting business models right. As my friend Alan Kay (he's ex-Apple) often remarks: "The best way to predict the future is to build it." It was on this premise that I approached the prospect of 3G mobile systems through the mid to late 90s, right up to the UK licensing and rollout fiasco of the year 2000 and beyond. Despite the protestations of many including myself, the industry was raped of billions of pounds by government, over 250,000 jobs were lost, the technology was more than three years late, operators didn't share base station sites, there were no significant service offerings beyond those that had already failed during the WAP fiasco and costs were wholly uneconomic for individuals and companies. As it turned out, the much celebrated '2Mbps to your handset' never happened and customers don't surf the web, send photographs or engage in videoconferencing via mobiles. In short, industry over-promised and under-delivered. If only government, regulators and industry had concentrated on the customers how different it might have been! So here I am with a group of youngsters with their Swiss Army Knife mobile phones - i.e. they do absolutely everything imaginable but badly. What do they do with them? In order of popularity it seems to go like this: text, talk, ring tones, pics, music and movies. I can hear the mobile executives salivating from here! Surely we can make lots of money out of ring tones, pics, music and movies - can't we? Sorry but no! Text is cheap and the primary user mode. Voice is used but only if you really have to. And the rest are mainly done offline using a USB cord or Bluetooth. Then of course there is BlueJacking - sending messages and pics to people across a room at random or by design, mobile-to-mobile. Fun, eh? Lots of megabits being moved around but not over the mobile network. My prediction: 3G will continue to limp along with the lukewarm support of an indifferent customer base and an industry trying to recover its sunk network and licence costs for a decade or more. As for watching TV and movies over the mobile network, will people do it and will the industry make money? I might be wrong but my advice to the industry is: don't hold your breath! Pocket-sized full-colour TV sets have been available for years at less than $100 and don't sell in large numbers. On second thought, praying might be a safer bet than holding your breath. Contrast all of this with the DIY world of Wi-Fi and VoIP, where the customers established the need and have largely funded the rollout. Interestingly this prospect was identified and proven probably as early as 1996 but the mobile and fixed operators had their sights firmly fixed on extracting an extra $1000 a year from every household in the land with a raft of new technologies and a questionable list of improbable services. Just where was the money supposed to come from? Well, watch out for 4G, 5G, 6G etc... it is time to watch the users and the technology again