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...