Orient Expression

Andrew Gray in Australia has created a service that translates standard URL addresses into numbers that make browsing on your mobile phone easier and faster. The rationale is that a numeric interface is comfortable to use on a mobile phone, anyone who's tried to use the keypad alphabetic interface will certainly agree that it's clunky. The service is found at http://www.digiturl.com More information can be found at http://digiturl.blogpost.com Found on Lifehacker Australia .

Doing the trawl of the RSS feeds I came across an article from the BBC, Don't be lonely at Christmas time . A rundown of alternative social network platforms. Of interest, only because of the business model, was Capazoo . Capazoo has joined social networking with gaming and has created a currency the Zoop . A Zoop is worth $0.01 and can be earned in the following ways Getting Tipped for your videos, music, photos, profiles, and more… Inviting your friends to join you at Capazoo Sharing in our Advertising Revenues Sharing in Capazoo’s Profits They offer the Capazoo cash card that allows a subscriber to convert Zoops into real cash at an ATM. This convergence of gaming and other internet usage is not a new idea and has been applied to other functions, like spam reduction . Techdirt had a strong reaction to the email meets gaming idea that might prove to short sighted. The idea of a form of stickiness like earning currency for activity will be tried in other platforms in 20

HM The Queen Elizabeth II has taken steps into Web 2.0 by starting a channel on YouTube. The move marks the 50th anniversary of her first Christmas Speech to the nation. A tradition that sees the family sit in front to the TV after Christmas lunch to hear the summary of the year from the perspective of the Royal Family. The content will include this years speech with the hope being that it will bring today's British youth closer to the monarchy. Go and visit the site on YouTube. See related story on the BBC portal

Last year saw the first mention/ promise of city wide WiMax in Milton Keynes, UK. The combination of ConnectMK and Freedom4 are offering WiMax to residents and small businesses with synchronous speeds of 8Mb/s. The package is being targeted at home workers who need more upload capacity as they go about their work. This is being touted as the f irst commercial application of WiMax in the UK. The main differentiator that is being highlighted is no need for a BT line required to support traditional ADSL services. This is after successful trials in both Milton Keynes and Warwick. Next stop Manchester .

On Click this week there was a short slot about Barracuda . Their report highlights that upwards of 95% of email now passes directly to Junk Mail. So apparently Spam can do nearly everything now, as in 100% of activity. So what can we do about it read Getting Some Control of Email Back

From iTWire . Predictions on eBook readers and the success of the partnership between Dymocks and the iLiad

iPhones baby brother, iTouch , looks very similar but doesn't allow you to make phone calls, or does it? Engadget has run a series of posts on iTouch hacks that make the iTouch able to make VoIP calls. Adding an external microphone News on VoIP applications Now today they are advertising a free download of a SIP based VoIP client app for the iTouch. It was only a matter of time before someone found another use for the onboard WiFi connection of this nice looking device.

The past couple of months have seen the entire country unplugged from the internet more times than I care to count. You can always tell it's a national problem when you phone the call centre and end up being on hold for 10 minutes or so. I don't know if this is to stop being hassled or because there really are a lot of people reporting the problem. Suggestions of using IVR updates to handle some of the calls "If you are phoning about internet connection difficulty, there is a problem and we are working on it. Please check back for updates" would be a good option, however it falls on deaf ears. What I'm not sure of is the cause of the problem. Lack of infrastructure investment More people going online Fragility of links out of Thailand There certainly is a lack of investment in infrastructure. One calculation suggests that if everybody that could go online went online at the same time each user would get 1.2Kb of bandwidth. As an example to get the copper wire

18 months ago this post made some predictions on flash memory both increasing in size and decreasing in price. It's time to revisit the concept of the ultimate devise of magnetic drives. In Business Week's break down of the iTouch that lays out the differences between it's stable mate the iPhone and what is unique to the iTouch the use of Flash memory is raised. The observation is that the iTouch is the future vision of the classic iPod and along with losing the click wheel in favour of touch screen functions the magnetic drive will replaced by ever bigger (and cheaper) flash memory storage. The original evolution that was predicted saw the use of multiple flash memory cards to create one large logical drive. In the time that has passed large steps have been taken in Solid State Drives that seems they being used in laptops today. While the capacity of SD cards hasn't changed much since the original post capacity has increased in flash memory technology with USB pe

Too good not to share :) http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/so-thats-why-we.html

There are many social networking platforms and content items that we want to share with our friends, contacts, family members. The problem is that with so many platforms, some of which are very specific, it is difficult to keep track of comings and goings. Enter a new/revised role for the blog. That of Social Network Aggregation. Many of the platforms provide some from of publishing aide, call them badges, widgets, gadgets whatever they have the same basic purpose. They allow a blogger to insert elements into their blogs to share content and site links. Having played with some of these tools the effect can be a very cluttered blog that might send the wrong message. Some people blog on separate themes and want to partition up the content to help the subscriber base. They might blog on technology in one area, management or self improvement in an another. Blogger has added lots of new features and the blogger community has further enhanced the capabilities of the free tool. It is alr

Ideas on how buttons can be replaced by voice interfaces. Read my posting on the PhoneTalk blog.

Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge Is Knol a Wikipedia Challenger?

Google's latest venture is project Knol . A Knol is a unit of knowledge. Google are encouraging people to contribute within their particular expertise. Sound familiar? many people are comparing this to Wikipedia which is a very different model. Wikipedia is all about collaborative authoring. Knol is individual contributions posted up on Google to be returned in the page ranks at the top of the search results. Knol is informed, authoritative wisdom of the individual. Wikipedia is well meaning, keen, hard working content aggregators looking to share in a collaborative effort. What is the aim behind the project? Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project. Udi Manber, VP Engineering. What is the real aim be

There has been lots of discussion on Kindle and eBooks in general. Besides the obvious use for reference books by the IT industry, in particular IT consultants that work onsite a lot, there is another use for eBooks and gadgets. Geek Travel. Travel is an obvious target. Many people take the opportunity to take 6+ months off and travel the world. Guide books are heavy, bulky objects. There is a rich trade in swapping books at the natural convergence points around the world. Some people plan very carefully and take the required pages with them. But if you've only got specific pages and you want to wander off your trail you're up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Why not then take all of your books, and some for countries that you might not actually have a plan, with you on your eBook Reader. Something like Kindle , iLiad or Sony Reader . Go get your travel books from Rough Guide , Travelfish or search through Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree project . While you're

The Greek prophet Calchas might have been successful in predicting the future of the books popularity but what would he have thought of eBooks? Not so long after the announcement on the Kindle, which in turn has created a lot of coverage around the blogosphere, iRex have announced a partnership with Dymocks books in Australia. This is significant as it moves the eBook reader into the traditional outlet to harness it's capabilities and potential popularity. Dymocks may be achieve first mover advantage in actively partnering with what other sellers may see as the competition. The iLiad 's on board WiFi connection can be used there in the store to download compatible books (they have to be in the mobipocket format). iLiad's strengths also include the ability to read PDF and display HTML, something Kindle can do with support through the Amazon portal only. Let's hope that the New Zealand branches also offer the service.

TiVo , the DVR box that evolved the VCR into the first form of a timeshifting product has been building out a network of content partners in an effort to diversify it's offering beyond TV. Why? The Techdirt Insight Community has already been asked this year on Video Store 2.0 and the potential impacts of IPTV on the regular broadcasting providers. The reality is that TV scheduling and broadcasting is under disruption and niche vendors like TiVo need to soften the impact. I'm glad to see that they're moving in the right direction with new partnership announcements in the content and importantly user/community generated content spaces. It's been a slow and steady approach to becoming a true media company. Announced this week are partnerships with Music Choice giving TivoCast subscribers access to a store of music videos. Combines this with the rollout of the previously integration with Rhapsody and you get a learning device that can help you comb that music video st

Social Networking sites have become really popular. The growth is being driven primarily by Gen Y'ers with young Gen X'ers following up. However Gen Y is known as being quite fickle and will go looking for the next big thing if something changes. A trait that has suffered cell phone operators has started to be felt in the growth world of Facebook, MySapce and Bebo. The trait of churn . Many users, for many reasons, have churned away from MySpace and headed over to Facebook. The reasons need to be analyzed and addressed if the share is to be maintained. Why do users churn? are they looking for more control, more privacy, more applications, less stickiness. Stickiness is usually a strong point. However one of the best example of stickiness going wrong is AOL. They make it very difficult to change ADSL vendors. One reason is the way that your email contacts are so difficult to retrieve to import to a new service like Gmail. Bebo has recently announced support for Goog

As part of the process of changing jobs I am try to move central control from my soon to be ex-company laptop to my own machine at home. I have already followed a good set of instructions on moving my iTunes library, even though I lost all of my podcast subscriptions. Overall the process was greatly simplified by the fact that I use a USB disk to hold all of the podcast and music files. The next big thing for me is to break the ties from my browser(s). I use bookmarks a lot and was looking for something useful to keep my bookmarks in synch. I was playing with the idea of using Jetpaks which I have found to be extremely useful for collating and aggregating links I am using for specific research. But before I took the plunge I had a quick walk around to see if this was something easier then the good old export/import process. I found many, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, including Foxmarks and Google Browser Synch . I decided to try out these two: BookKit 2Go synch Boo

I was really excited to read about Kindle from Amazon . I have been interested in the idea of a book reader for some time as I use a lot of reference books and read a lot when traveling. I still enjoy the book experience but it's not convenient to lug a load of books around with you as you move from hotel to hotel. The other benefit is the ready access to English language books which aren't always easy to find in Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. I have written about how book readers still could evolve to be more akin to reading a book but that is some time away. So what is different about Kindle compared to it's peers... uses e-ink to save battery power wireless access to Wikipedia But most of the differentiators are in the wireless delivery and browsing ability to the content portal from the device. Knidle uses EV-DO to deliver the book, up to 200, on to your device. You can also use the USB connection to manage the content from your PC. The only problem is th

During some research for a submission on the Techdirt Insight Community , on the use of camera phones, I stumbled across ShotCode . The basic idea is to use your camera and Bluetooth connection to read a simple circular barcode on a poster or object. The code is interpreted and further information is sent back to the handset for you to read. Some usage examples: History of maintenance in a server room, a code on each rack or machine Further information on an object, great use to get kids interested in museums Advert context, show times for a film I was also talking to a family member about how to make the London Underground more user friendly for foreign visitors. I like the idea of using ShotCodes on the station that could give visitors an idea on what is available near this station (shops, sights etc) and potentially how to get there IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. A different code for German, Chinese, Thai etc. The use of this concept could finally allow camera phones to jump into the ave

The pet peeve of most of us today is the amount of spam that we get. When gmail was invite only the combination of a semi-closed community and a pretty good spam filter meant that the volume was far less than I would see in Hotmail or Yahoo mail. Unfortunately that seems to have changed, although as Joe Duck comments Gmail say it is reducing. I have taken some steps to get some more control, starting with Yahoo. After reading Om's posting on add-ons to outlook I had a play with Boxbe and configured it against my Yahoo account. Fairly painless to do but I really want to run it for a while before commenting further. One of the features that stands out though is the "access charge" that they levy and share with you for passing on your account details to a company that your Boxbe profile suggests would be interested in you. This resonates with a discussion I had a couple of years ago with a friend of mine on an overall revamp of the email eco system. If you were to ch

When Blockbuster said they were looking to get into mobile distribution I assumed they were thinking of mobile handsets and I forgot all about ultra mini projectors like Microvisions PicoP . Combining a projector equipped handset with a download from Blockbuster makes the same sense as an iPod with a cable to view on your TV. Remember the shot in "The Island" where Ewan McGregor projects his video conference from his mobile phone onto the wall, well imagine that being a film...

We're moving to New Zealand in the New Year to start the next chapter. I plan to post more frequently as I will get more time and not so much travel.

David Seah and his very well put together Printable CEO Series has shared his compact calendar for 2008. There are many country specific versions available from his site and his readers. I have modified the data for Thailand for 2008 . Take the time to have a look around his site, it's well worth the time.

Location based services are set to be one of the growth areas for mobile devices through 2008. Previous posts here on the general subject of LBS and usage and contributions to the Techdirt Insight Community on GPS and personal navigation discuss the combination of LBS with franchises or focus usage. On example was a potential partnership with The Lonely Planet inspired by Loki, see the Loki Plant Guide . Engadget today posted on Google's cell site location service (I'm making an assumption that it uses cell triangulation in lieu of GPS). For general use location based services don't, in my opinion, need to be metre level sensitive. Google's neighbourhood level approach should be enough for the average user. The evolution would be targeted ad, mobile location context adsense. So expect to see small (Mom and Pop) businesses using the service to increase publicity.

In a follow up on previous postings on Blockbuster: How Blockbuster could Wimaximize their business Blockbuster to start a download service Engadget have posted that Blockbuster are considering a deal to get their content on to mobile handsets. The actual details are still under consideration but there is some debate as to the value of the scheme. I have contributed to the Techdirt Insight Community on how video needs to adapt and one of the natural conclusions is mobile device distribution. Before I had my iPod I would have questioned the benefits of mobile on small screen devices but you get used to it and when you travel a lot and spend a lot of time in hotels and planes the potential market is there (but small). It does depend on which mobile devices you consider. If you limit yourself to mobiles then questions marks are probably valid, think battery, screen size and interruption from calls. However expand the scope to devices like the Nokia N810 and you could be onto somethin

Golden Telecom and the Golden Arches have teamed up to provide WiFi equipment and services in the 175 McDonalds outlets across Russia. Starbucks has long been the haunt of out of work or writers block authors looking to catch up and some work. Maybe the trend is moving away from Half Fat Latte to Big Mac Meals as the staple of the budding writers. I expect we'll hear the inevitable cheery question "would you like WiFi with that?"

It was a joy to be able to use WiFi when traveling from Edinburgh down to Peterborough . Had to pay for it though as I wasn't in First Class. However good news is that now that National Express have been successful in their bid to operate the East Coast main line, replacing GNER, they plan to extend free WiFi to standard class passengers. For a journey like Peterborough to Edinburgh the train will certainly become a real alternative to flying. The company I work for has offices in both Cambridge and Edinburgh with frequent visits required. The preferred option is EasyJet. Today with heightened security, a trip to Luton airport, wait times, lost baggage, delays and a trip from the airport at the other end the train is no slower than flying. Add in free WiFi and the happy little workers can still book billable hours on the way.

Skype took a big credibility hit on Thursday when an unknown number of people could not log in to the one of the most well known VoIP clients in the market today. Take a deep breath and hope this is some glitch in the software and not the limitation of the peer to peer network capabilities. The problem started out as a login problem and there people started receiving delayed IM sessions hit the client. The IM sessions have often been a bit flaky and I often receive a delay in getting them (upwards of 2 days in some cases). Thinking back I wonder if this was the start of a problem that mushroom clouded for them on Wednesday/Thursday depending where you are in the world. They have been working hard to fix the problem and for me at least service seems to be more stable. After a laboured login I at least maintain a session now. At first it was hard to tell as with Skype normally being so efficient at finding a connection I assumed it was the flaky ADSL infrastructure at my end in Thaila

The Solutions and Content Exhibition Korea (SEK) has just finished and there has been some focus on Korea's own Wireless Broadband (Wibro). WiMax, as it's more globally recognized, is very active as a technology in Korea and they represent the bleeding edge of the use and deployment of the 802.16 standard. The Bangkok Posts Tony Waltham was in Seoul for SEK and you can see his write up of his experience with the WiMax Muni Net from this link . Samsung took the opportunity to show off there newest Wibro phone, the PDA M8100. As it's only available in Korea today the only write up from the vendor I could find was in Korean so I can share the write up on UberGizmo . I might be heading to Korea for a couple of months in August so it will be good to experience Wibro first hand. If it happens expect some write ups here. For a round up of SEK read Tony Waltham's article in the Bangkok Posts Database weekly supplement.

Almost one year ago I posted on this blog about how operators that have invested in public telephone networks could still use the asset today in the day of prolific mobile phone use. This was the convergence of two main ideas Using street lights as Wifi Hotspots , they are everywhere and they are powered. Also as I noted if you combine with broadband over power line (BPL) you also don't need to invest in new cabling and the convenience of no minimal disruption that no digging brings makes this compelling. After the limited success of Ionica and their fixed wireless network a case for fixed wireless today. There is a summary available on Telegeography of how TeliaSonera are looking to adapt their network of phone booths to become WiFi hotspots. The math has to make sense as the revenue stream from these assets has to be impacted by mobile use. Though somewhat redundant functionally they still represent real presence for the operator on the high street and so any use that can b

I have just read an interesting post at the Register on soe recent announcements for GPS in the UK. This comes close to me completing a challenge question on the Techdirt Insight Community on the future of personal navigation devices. I do believe that, with the number of mobile handsets now sporting GPS and a handful of Bluetooth GPS device available that you can connect to your mobile, GPS and Location Based Services are ready for large scale adoption. You can read my insights from here: PNDs for Pedestrians PNDs for Vehicles Telmap has an interesting spin on the collaborative and community aspects that I mentioned. And it will be interesting to see how the Vodafone & TomTom deal evolves. If you are a Jeteye user you can also access my Jetpak .

UMA, the technology that allows WiFi and GSM convergence should be a natural evolution for carriers. The infrastructure costs are less than GSM and if you read my post on how carriers could use the volume of home WiFi hotspots to build out their network, FVNO , then it should be compelling. Katie at GigaOm had written a good lowdown for those who want to be in the know on UMA [ not Thurman ]

Here in Thailand the Government have been pushing gasahol pretty hard. Gasahol is blended petrol and ethanol. The trouble is that Thailand loves the Honda Civic and it's VTEC engine, apparently VTEC doesn't like ethanol very much, however I wonder if it would like something a bit sweeter. Researchers at University of Wisconsin are two years away from producing biofuel from natural sugars (Fructose). The upside is that a sugar based biofuel is 40% more dense than corn based ethanol and this means more fuel once fractionated. Initial studies have shown that a sugar based fuel cell could power an engine. Read the article on iTWire The other option here is biodiesel , which uses palm oil and is one of the projects of HM King Bhumipol. Australia opened a palm oil based biodiesel plant last year and is set to produce 140 Million litres per year.

In an article that reminds me of the file Chain Reaction a team of scientists are looking at the possibility of creating energy from fusion using lasers and sea water. The technology is theoretical at the moment and faces some challenges in laser development, more powerful and faster cyclical rates. There is a very good write up on the process on the BBC Technology mini site

Less than one year ago I posted this article on how flash memory could evolve and replace traditional drives with moving parts. Well Fujitsu are following this path by using Samsung produced SSD in their Lifebook Q and B laptops. And the trend is set to continue with Intel now producing a flash memory drive that is set to replace magnetic hard disk drives. This is good news for battery life. The reason why an iPod can have good play times is that the solid state drive doesn't have to use energy to spin for reading. Putting SSD technology in laptops will extend the life of the battery for mobile use and allow us to break away from offices for longer. It might that people traveling in business class can actually conduct some business as the battery should now last longer than 2 hours :)

In a development that reminds me on the face of it of that clip in Back to the Future when they raid the dustbins to fuel Mr Fusion.... the latest development on alternative energy is using your leftover food to generate methane and hydrogen. In the 90's there was a fad about wormeries . The basic concept is put your food rubbish (highly selective) into a bin with [tiger] worms in and get a form of liquid fertilizer tapped of from the bottom. The fuel process is similar in the food rubbish is dumped into vat-like generators. Microbes break down the rubbish and in the process the resulting gas, typically methane and hydrogen, can be tapped of from the top and used in specialized vehicles. For more see the Technology Review .

In an innovation that could cut the cost of solar energy technology in half. Soliant Energy now provide a solar concentrator. One of the application problems of solar panels has been how to get the maximum efficiency out of the installation. One solution has been to mount the panels on a pole that allow sun tracking. The system from Soliant bypasses this need, which makes the panels subjected to wind conditions, by using traditional roof panels with individual panes that can track. The panes reflect the light to a row of photovoltaic cells. Read more from Technology Review .

This is the first of a series of new posts on how the electricity we use and the we use it is up for disruption, loosely termed Power 2.0 to stay in the trend of the 2.0 boom. For some time I have been looking to build a house here in Thailand and I am very keen to generate as much of our own power needs as possible. The emergence of alternative energy in Thailand is not very strong as today power is quite cheap. Thailand is blessed with an average of 12 hours of sunlight year round, yet the country still heavily relies on oil for electricity production. There are quite a few hydro electric dams in the country, mostly place by the King. One energy source, the Sun, is up for some changes as EGAT (Electrivity Generating Authority of Thailand) now agree to buy back any surplus energy. This change in the economics means that you could now recover the costs within 10 years opposed to the potential 20 to 30 years before. You can tell then that solar today is cost prohibitive. One of the

There's a new beat on the street, the use and benefits of Product Portfolio Management. The current leader is Tribold . The intention is to get products to market faster, this is targeted at Telecom companies with a known time to market problem. The idea centralize the product management function that has a single view and representation of a product. This can then be shared with CRM, OSS and BSS systems. With powerful reporting that can show take up of the offering and the unified product master when CRM, OSS and BSS will be in synch this should be a great boost for offering promotion to market. It's also not limited to telecom as this is a problem that many enterprises face today with disparate applications using the data (CRM, Self Care, Financials, Manufacturing, Distribution). The great enabler for me is that will allow MVNO's to communicate their product vision to OSS and BSS provider of choice. The trend will be for pick best of breed billers for market segments,

There has been many attempts to make PC's as small as possible or to equip cell phones with as many PC features as possible. The realization that as wireless broadband gets more prolific and todays workforce is more mobile than ever before the need to have small, capable PC's is very real. Palm aired their approach, the Foleo at D: last week . Touted as a Cell Phone Companion it has many of the features required by a PC and uses the phone to create the connection. Now Taiwan is pushing it's pledge for the space. For a long time Taiwan cell phone manufacturers have understood the need for cell phones to have a full keyboard, Dopod and HTC both have handsets with slide out keyboards. Now they are looking at full PC features in small units. Via Technologies are launching the Nanobook . A small but powerful PC that at less than 1 Kilogram is looking for convenient portability. Asus are launching the PC 701 or Eee . At 2 pounds, WiFi and solid state storage this mini PC sho

Teradici are hoping to blur the lines between PC and Data Centre. Their solution allows a use to view multiple screens and control the blade PC over IP. This is kind of like the dumb terminals with a new edgy deployment. The intention is that all of the computing power is performed offsite in a centralized area, the Data Centre, and this will save on power and maintenance costs as the engineers are co-located with the hardware and therefore don't have to go out to the client site for basic maintenance. The Teradici Company Article found in the Wall Street Journal

The internet is adapting faster than ever before. Web 2.0 is seeing innovation at an increasing rate and social networking platforms, mashups, online collaboration and Software as a Service (SaaS) is showing what can be achieved and still have customer service as a core value. Telco's are renowned for over engineering seeking the elusive 5 9's (99.999%) when in reality less is more. Skype can suffer lower voice quality but generally the quality is more than adequate for the average user. Compare this to mobile call quality from a network centric operator and where the results can be shocking. The Web 2.0 is driving customers into new levels of collaboration and the Generation Me subscriber expects more from their services. Increasingly the need to immediate response and low cost means that the Telco's have a real challenge, despite the impact [or not] of Skype, Jajah, Gizmo and Vonage, the reality is that the Telco style of service is not good enough for the average Joe

Almost one year ago I wrote up an idea on how distributors, like Blockbuster, could stay in touch with the speed of innovation that technology and internet usage is experiencing. This was an idea about how Blockbuster could use WiMax as a distribution platform. Yesterday Lionsgate announced that Blockbuster are due to start a download service similar to the recent announcement that iTunes will start a movies download service. The timing comes just after a wrote an insight for Techdirt on how TV is up for disruption in the light of TV and film distribution that is being driven by web TV services like Kyte and Joost. You can download the insight from here .

Another news piece from D: All Things Digital is the new device from Palm, Foleo. The Linux based device could give one of my favourite devices the Nokia 770 a real run for it's money. Key Features: 10 Inch screen 2.5 lbs 5 hours run time Bluetooth WiFi Opera Hot sync with in range phones All in all a promising looking product. I would like to get my hands on it and have a play. See more from the Wall Street Journal

The announcement from D: All Things Digital yesterday was the coffee table PC aka Surface. This is Microsoft latest move into hardware (following XBox and Zune). The large interactive surfaces uses five cameras to detect location and movement. The intention is to have the surface identify the object and allow the user to interact with it, examples: transfer files, by WiFi, from the camera to the PC see which services are available and book seats for shows etc deduct balance from prepaid cards - this one is currently aimed at the Casinos There is a good write up here from the Wall Street Journal

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been disrupting traditional software business models for a few years with providers such as Salesforce.com providing enterprise level systems through a hosted service. The mobile market is ripe for the same treatment, the early example was Blackberry, but how else will the SaaS model evolve cellular communications as we understand it today? You might like to read the insight that I wrote for the Techdirt Insight Community, you can download it here .

In a move that might change the landscape of mobile operators Vodafone and Orange have chosen to share their radio access network and their new UMTS network elements. This is to give them a predicted saving of 20 to 30 percent in operating and capital expenses for their 2G and 3G networks over the coming years. A trial of this sharing was announced in the Spanish companies of the two firms in the back end of last year but this was only for 3G networks. The potential for a working model like this is huge in built up areas where there is already cell saturation and no way for new players to enter the market or where existing players have poor coverage. A report has been written that says that for this to work effectively a third company needs to be set up to cover the operation. This is for the passive equipment and not the radio frequencies or transceivers and in many ways mirrors the not-merger of NokiaSiemens hardware vendors that support Vodafone and Orange.

I recently signed up to join the Techdirt Insight Community , and was selected. The community is a distributed think tank like blob of bloggers that can work on items that interest them. Companies hire Techdirt to get analysis and feedback on key challenges. One example that I filed some insight on was "Adapt a Telco to Survive". I was lucky enough to have my thoughts highlighted as one of the top three and received my first payment through PayPal. Having just finished reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams' book Wikinomics it's very refreshing to see an outlet, an ideagora, where I can contribute within the same domain and have the possible benefit of being paid for your efforts. Many of the subjects are open so that I can circulate the insight so I might start uploading summaries here.

Some time ago I posted about MixIt. At the time the nearest competitor that I knew of was Agile . But Agile only supported SIP based IM clients. I just had another look as I start to prepare an insight for the Techdirt Insight Community and I see that Agile now has Google Talk as a listed supported IM clients. There are more and more players emerging into this space EQO allows for integration with IM and Skype using a GPRS connection to allow you to make Skype calls. This is ideal if you have a plan that supports as much as you can eat but operators in Thailand (DTAC, AIS, TrueMove) are very slow in adopting such plans even though their ARPU is really poor anyway for data services. Jangl has announced some significant upgrades to their service. They claim to be able to map a phone number to all email accounts in the world. I am very interested to find a service that will allow me to create a collection centre to be used as I overlay David Allen's Getting Things Done acr

While playing around with my new favourite collaboration tool, Jeteye , I saw that it was possible to save IM's as well. This led me to Meebo . Meebo allows you to embed an IM client into your website or blog through a widget that you can configure as MeeboMe.com. You can get a multi way conversation from your site(s) in parallel in browser at Meebo.com. The thing I like about Meebo is that I can also connect to any SIP client and have a consolidated list of my contacts and who is online and offline. I can set my presence globally and this cascades to all of the clients. No more having Yahoo say I'm in a meeting and MSN saying that I'm available. The application of this client is for on demand client service or similar real time contacts from your web presence. A great little b-web product.

Back in March of this year the BBC posted an article on their supersite about the problems with Microsoft Vista and access through the UK broadband providers. "Other net service firms have also admitted that the appearance of Vista has caused some hiccups for users." The problem is coming from the new system not being able to run the installation discs that are supplied. Now in May my family in the UK have purchased a new Acer laptop from Tesco and are still suffering problems getting online, all because of a disc. The real problem is that nearly all of the providers in the UK send you an installation disc and an USB modem for service provision. The installation of the modem requires the disc and this is where the problem arises with Vista. The dictionary.com entry for Vista has the following defintion. "a view or prospect, esp. one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage, as between rows of trees or houses." "a far-reaching mental view: vistas of the

I have just listened to the Lifehack.org podcast with David Hayden of Jeteye . As soon as I got the chance I registered and straight away I have found the product to be extremely useful and a great booster for me. The theory is simple. Rather than wander around and create bookmarks use Jeteye to collect objects (files, links, videos etc) into a jetpak. The collection process is a simple but effective drag and drop interface which is very intuitive for today's users. The collection is then stored and highly available from your account page on Jeteye.com . This jetpak collection can then be shared, with the usual controls over actions, which is a real boost for collaborative and virtual teams. I'm definitely going to be using it to collect objects around some of my projects (as in the GTD term) and I am going to try and see if I can find a way to overlay it into my organization. Maybe there are plans to allow a company to deploy it standalone inside a corporate network. It&

Some 18 months ago I wrote a post on Presence; Presence of Mined . I figured it was time to revisit the subject of presence and see what is being said today. The first post of interest is a piece over on ThreeDimensionalPeople is presence a red herring . The core themes for presence not stacking up are: unbound data means that everybody knows where you are, or aren't. This allows for negative reinforcement of people's opinions unless.... you can slice up you world and have your presence set my subscriber. This is the same process that you can perform in Yahoo Messenger by group and individual settings (but not Skype [yet]) but if you tried it then you know how time consuming it is, and this is their point. The other point for me is you need to be careful that your worlds don't overlap, otherwise you need to be able to control which setting takes precedence... the presence precedent Context centricity, presence needs to be more subjective in how it's set [and receive

Back in June of last year I posted an idea on what I termed " meeting room in a box " which for me evolved into Conference 2.0. Trawling around the web last weekend I stumbled across an entry on Lifehack.org on Attend Conferences Without Being There . Some of the basic ideas and concepts are very similar, in particular the idea of follow up for networking using LinkedIn . Many of the IT centric conferences are starting to catch on to the idea and this is also being driven from some of the attendees who blog about it during and immediately after the event. I think that there will soon be a large adoption of these concepts possibly even with access link WebEx after to get paraphrased versions of the keynote speeches, another use for podcasts and video casts.

In another blog I have been playing with the new features available in Blogger Beta . I was very happy with the results so I have moved my blog back to blogspot to enable the use of these features. Web 2.0 features - widgets, UI improvements More of a mashup feel Labels - GoogleBlogger application of categories - easily extended to label (tag) clouds All in all I have had enough fun with it to make the move back. Update your bookmarks: http://orient-expression.blogspot.com assuming that you're getting this from RSS. Also feel free to sign up for email subscriptions