Orient Expression

Almost 1 year ago Paul in his usual tongue-in-cheek approach blogged about the foresight of Uma Thurman's parents Well in a shock exposure she has decided to become a Danish National !! The Baltic trader that is TeliaSonera, with presence in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, is the first mobile operator to release [publicly] UMA into it's network. Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA is the technology that allows more traditional mobile operators to create a pire into their GSM network to allow people to start make use of some of the IP and dual mode feature on their phones. It, in theory, allows mobile subscribers to use VoWiFi features but this then gets routed through onto the GSM network. It is one of the real enablers for one form of fixed mobile convergence (FMC) that opens up the mobile handset to be used for home based telephony, using SIP phone. The key benefits for the subscriber are that they have the convenience of their contacts at their fingertips when using their phon...

I thought I'd have a go at using the Windows Live Writer to add blog entries. The configuration to be able to blog to blogger from here is pretty easy, we'll see if it works as well as it would imply. I have tried this with Writely, now Goolgelized, and it work from time to time but was not consistent. I have the same (if not more) options for editing in Live Writer. I want to see if I can unlink myself from having to log in to Blogger all the time, of course as you can expect the toolbar that includes folio and the blog tools is only visible in IE as far as I can tell.

Milton Keynes is famous for two, maybe three things: Lots and lots and lots of roundabouts Concrete Cows XScape -indoor snow zone amongst other things Now it is set to become the site of the first commercial use of WiMax in the UK (as far as I can see). There's been a lot of buzz about this so here are a few of the blog ping echoes: Andy Aramson VoIP Watch iTWire The Register Gizmodo (Warning! includes Concrete Cows) James Enck EuroTelcoblog ;) Pretty upbeat news off the back of the Sprint announcements that it's 4G network will be mobile WiMax based. A recent article in Telecom Asia here lays out the developing business case for WiMax depsite the pessimism from the old school (but no surprises there).

At the weekend I sat down and took some time to go through Seth Godin's Web 2.0 list to see what was out there. The usual suspects are at the top but I wasn't looking for the volume but the movement that shows increasing; albeit brief maybe, popularity. After a long trawl a couple caught my eye for further research and some I went as far as registering. More than a cursory glance: ChainReading ZoHo SlideStory In the might go back later category: RedToucan - more social networking. Today I use LinkedIn and openBC Mozy EchoSign ThinkFree There was the usual mixture of URL not found errors that come with this hit and miss approach :( What comes out of my walk about is the niche of it all. Some of the sites look good but are obviously meant for a very small number of people. Still it's good to see that in many cases the internet is becoming easy to use that some of these groups and sites exist at all.

Paul Jardine once coined the phrase "the other network" when talking about the mobile operators in the UK spending vast amounts of money to build out their networks when there was already a network that could (with some thought) have been used. By this he meant the slowly decaying Public Phone network. Now I am working with a fixed line operator here in Thailand that still maintain a pay phone infrastructure, this is barely used due to the proliferation of mobile phones; a trend that is bound to be repeated in countries all over the world. So what can the Telco's do about it? In my converging ideas posting I highlighted the innovation that I had long been thinking of that New Zealand Telecom are driving forward with. This was the natural expansion of two previous ideas that I had expanded on and is a WiFi twist on the other network idea of Paul. The basic concept is that the pay phone becomes a node in the MuniNet (Municipal Network). This could equally be using ...

I've been looking into getting a Fax setup at home, I know what you're thinking why? The truth of it is here in Thailand faxing is still very popular. You cannot assume that any of your business partners have an internet connection (other than dialup) due to the low penetration of broadband outside of Bangkok, so....? Normally you would say get a Fax modem and use some sort of fax software. Problem: It took almost 1 year to get one telephone line put into the house, I can't afford to wait that long for a second analog line. Other options include the online services such as MBox , which looks good but I would still like to find a solution. Well I think I have two options: A pure old school hardware solution: Andy Abramson over at VoIP Watch put me onto this with his posting which led me to the Engadget page for the Sharp Broadband fax machine. The UX-B800SE provides the usual fax machine features that you would expect from an analog machine, it also has an Ethernet co...

In the second part of my three things series I would like to focus on three things that I would like to own to add to my current toolkit . Nokia 770 Nokia E60 Jabra SP500 Bluetooth speaker phone. Why? Nokia 770: apart from the fact that it looks cool :) there is a real use for this sort of device. Now that it has significantly improved and new applications are creeping into the domain I can see me using it in one of two modes; and not necessarily exclusively Communication: Gizmo phone and the ability to use Gmail and GoogleTalk mean that I have a means of communicating in my palm. This becomes useful when I am on a client site; like today where I need to be on their network to get to their servers but I need to use an external wireless network because their firewall and proxy doesn't allow me to use some sites. In this mode I can leave the 770 connected to the external network and still have my laptop connected to their LAN. The size lends itself to being used on the hoof a...

I am finding myself increasingly dependent on a couple of things that I now leave in my toolkit. My USB adapter for SD cards My external USB hard drive My Bluetooth headset SD cards: when was the last time you saw a laptop with a 1.44" drive; quite a long time I wager. However as I drop in and out of client sites I am faced with a series of connectivity problems which sometimes aren't worth solving given the duration of stay. More often than not this is around printing of documents. I started out using the normal USB or thumb drive but as I changed cameras I found that the SD card I had was no longer usable with my new camera. Also given that SD card storage size it increasing I looked for an alternative that gave me the flexibility of floppy disks without the expense. I adopted this guy , or at least something similar. I find it incredibly useful and I can carry more, smaller, SD cards around to give me extra capacity and flexibility without having to have lots of USB d...