Orient Expression

While much of the world, including some countries that Thailand thinks of as less technologically advanced, are reaping the benefits of 4G; Thailand has yet to get beyond the dabbling stage and jump in with both feet. It seemed to take an eternity to get on to 3G and at least one operator has made the jump to 4G trials.  Now the local regulator has finally (re)set the date for the long awaited auction of the spectrum and details are set to be announced in February. Normally I would be a strong supporter of a free market and all that a regulated market should bring in the way of competition, and therefore when market forces kick in what that then means for consumers in terms of value for money.  However, in this case I am wondering if there is a different answer to the problem. Having watched the mast alliances in Europe and regulator interventions in New Zealand and Australia I think that the antiquated Build, Operate, Transfer (BOT) agreements that Thai mobile opera...

New Zealand is a pretty country but it's also pretty slow in coming forward in many areas. It has it fair share of innovation but some parts of everyday life are still if not 20 years behind but at least 10...until now. Sky in the UK has made use of user driven options through handset interaction for some time, push the red button, Sky NZ still does not support this type of service. But this is where competition shows its value, it forces natural monopolies to innovate, and let's be honest Sky TV is a natural monopoly here by being the only digital TV service (which you have to use if you want to get a decent reception so Freeview doesn't count [yet]). Now Telecom has tied up with TiVo as the sole distributor in New Zealand Sky has had to play catch up, their response iSky. First impressions, given that the full service isn't launched yet, are good. Finally after years of me seeing other countries extending TV into the computer world with the likes of Yahoo -> TiVo ...

We all recognnise that not alll devices are made equal. Many handsets try to squeeze in a QWERTY keyboard for convenience, but the convenience is lost as the keys become too small to be useful to many users. Some four years ago I started thinking about breaking a typical phone into component parts, allowing you to adopt a best of breed approach to phone, camera, music player etc. This relied on some form of Bluetooth hub to facilitate the connectivity and some gadget to use as the input/control device. A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has decided that this gadget is you! more specifically your hand and arm. His idea is a Skinput device that allows finger jestures to be used as the control device. He also proposes that the receiver/reader would use Bluetooth technology to send that jesture as a command to the relevant hardware component. Interested to see if this becomes a reality...

This year's Olympics should be the best ever for coverage. Fring are looking for onsite commentators and as a means to encourage people are offering a 3.5G phone as your reporters tool. I hope that this will be the games of the micro blog. The potential for services like Twitter or Jaiku to open up access to the games in a way never seen before is encouraging. Essentially there are three dimensions to the games: Nation Event Athlete Typically broadcast of the games ha content defined by the nation. The USA channels closely follow the USA squad, the same for UK, NZ Australia etc. This is targeted at the national pride. For those people who are actively engaged in an event themselves, marathon, it's the event that is king. There will still be an element of "my country" but this is equally balanced by "my sport". The final element is the followers of a specific athlete. Friends, family and fans may elect to follow all of the events surrounding a person. ...

Less than 6 months after I posted my EFTPOS meets the Wellington public transport idea Snapper is now on the hook. Snapper is the Wellington take on the EZLink card with RFID payments for transport and micro payments. After seeing the first on-bus terminal on Tuesday today I witnessed the ANZ branded snapper keyring being used by a customer to buy their lunch. Back to the drawing board.

Walking around the compact city centre in downtown Wellington you gradually become aware of the grid of wires above your head. Having stretched the use of trams here into the late 40's the re-emergence of electrified public transport in the form of trolley buses is good to see. The first thing that strikes you is how quiet they are compared to their diesel counterparts. The next observation is that many of them seem to be conversions from old diesel buses, extending the life. There has also been investment in a new, purpose built, fleet that runs around the city and out to the suburbs. There are many cities in the UK that would certainly benefit from such a fleet of electric buses. Cambridge with it's narrow streets would be an easy city to retrofit and the benefits to the stone architecture of the colleges with less diesel fumes would be noticeable.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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 .

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 .

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...

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.