This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.
Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.
I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.
4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great
Nintendo announces new version of DS gaming handheld: the DSi » VentureBeat – interesting new design on the DS with the Nintendo DSi. The Nintendo DSi features two digital cameras, supports internal and external content storage, and connects to a Nintendo DSi Shop. The Nintendo DSi supports ‘physical games’ in addition to DS games with DSi-specific features and standard DS titles. The only exceptions in backwards compatibility is any DS products that use a Gameboy Advance slot.
Facebook Redesign Succeeds: Widgets Are Dead – interesting article on how the Facebook redesign has killed the basic widget Facebook application. Clearing this clutter will hopefully make Facebook a more useful and rewarding platform to use. I still personally dislike it however.
Social media and brands in 2009 – Shiny Red’s vox pop survey; nicely done. Wouldn’t necessarily agree with some of the trends such as the semantic web, but otherwise good material. More related content here.
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
I noticed in news coverage this evening that Vindigo had closed up shop. I first ran into Vindigo when the agency that I worked for launched their London guide. The software ran on Palm PDAs in glorious monochrome. At the time we were Palm’s EMEA agency of record, so were speaking to all the right people and could preload Vindigo on to journalist review units.
In terms of functionality the software provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars (the play section in the picture), shopping and the closest public toilet. It also had maps that provided point-to-point directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle. Think of Vindigo as a chimera of a listings magazine like Time Out and the directions functionality of Google Maps.
This was back in 2000, way before Google Mobile and GPS chips in everything. Palm was still a respectable technology company and the internet was going to change everyone’s lives but we just weren’t sure about the business model yet.
Vindigo worked on dead reckoning for its turn-by-turn directions and it was considerably more helpful than its rival. A spiral bound atlas of London streets by publisher A to Z. It was some five years ahead of where 2.0 technologies that would revolutionise how we found our way around the world. Vindigo’s navigation function was a clever hack that made the most of the technology then available. This all required a large amount of information, which would have to be created manually. This is why the city directories took time to create. It used APIs to pull across information like restaurants and cinema listings. All of this was kept in a compressed database that the Palm device would decompress in real time to access the relevant information stored on it.
Ignoring the personal information management software that comes as standard on a Palm for the moment, AvantGo (a kind of pre-RSS mobile newsreader) and Vindigo were the essential software that I carried on my PDA. More on Vindigo here.
FT.com – Vodafone slams curb on rates – The curb on rates is complex. I agree with Vodafone that consumers would not like to pay to receive calls as well as paying to make them – this would bring the UK more in line with the US experience. However, I can understand why a curb on charges is proposed. The curb in charges is inspired by roaming charges that are expensive and the stuff of modern-day horror stories. The curb on charges will be implemented More related content here.
Yahoo Bleeds Purple. And You Thought Microsoft’s Marketing Campaign Was Weird – not sure that as a consumer I would be clear about what the call to action is, but some of the elements in this are quite nice. For sneaker freaker completists; you may want to catch on to a set of limited edition Yahoo! vs Pony in a purple and white colorway. Without giving too much away I have spoken to people in the know and it will all make sense over the next couple of months. Keep an eye on Yahoo! UK for some changes sooner, rather than later
Urban Tours – interesting way for Blackberry to try and differentiate itself from the ubiquitous mapping applications now on smartphones. It also breaks out of the Brooks Brothers-clad Crackberry image
Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role – washingtonpost.com – “The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.”
