weareallgoingtodie.com

Seems like the uber-nerds at Google are up to some new shenanigans. Their latest target in their “don’t be too evil” global campaign is destroying copyright and censorship on their public policy blog.  I say go for it.  They have the money to shake things up, instead of buying totally useless companies (viz. Dodgeball, wtf?!?).  Let’s hope they do stir things up a little bit.  Meanwhile they are taking pictures of us in our underwear and putting them on the Internet.  Timely, especially since they are on this anti-IP/censorship kick.  Look, if they want to put pictures of me in my y-fronts online, god bless ‘em.

Google has released a lot of new things for their public relations developer day. I was on hand for the first talk about Google Gears. This product is admittedly very cool. It is an open source javascript library to store in a client-side SQL Lite DB, online content, thus making it browsable offline. This type of stuff gets my nerd juices flowing. That said, this product would be fantastic for any mobile phone with a browser that supports javascript. For example, if you go on the tube and lose signal, you wouldn’t lose your Gmail that you were writing.

Somebody asked about mobile and they said “we don’t talk about plans” or some crap.

So I asked, is there any chance it will work on Opera Mobile. (It is almost working on Opera.) Same bloody answer.

Then I realized, that answer means that they are working on it. Other questions that they weren’t actually working on, they would say, “That’s a good idea, let’s talk about that during one of our meals here at the conference.” There was lunch and brunch and snacks.

Three has now started offering Skype on it’s new N73 Series phones.  This actually comes as a bit of a shock and when it was pointed out, my inital thought was that it would be on Windows Mobile.  Not so. The new phones (which are a bit pricey) are running Symbian.  I called the fine folks in Mumbai who answer the Three phones and tried to get some tech specs.

However, they didn’t have any. The best I got from them is that you can run a lot of Windos programs on the new Symbian handsets.

Hmm.  I’ll have to look into that.

Reporo just won the Mobile Monday Global London Peer Awards. They have, admittedly, an interesting application, somehow including(through Jabber?) the various and sundry Instant Messenger clients. It also appears to pull RSS feeds of various things, including football scores. All of this sounds great. I mean, who wouldn’t want to IM with people from their phones (personally, well, me… but there is no accounting for taste, I suppose).

There is also free text messages within their network.

That is pretty cool.

However, and I hate to be the fly in the ointment, but I tried to install it on two different phones and was not able to do so. (T-Mobile MDA and a Nokia 6280)

I can’t get the application to run on either of these phones, and I can’t really invest more time in making it work. However, I understand the myriad complications of developing for mobile devices.

There are thousands of devices, dozens of operating systems, hundreds of different operators and content providers by the gazillions. Combining these factors creates a technical soup that is difficult to wade through. I’m still curious, which phones did Reporo work on?

This great article about the forthcoming swap to WiFi from traditional phone broadband. That sounds crazy. Traditional phone broadband. Yes, it is so hackneyed and trite. And a few years old.

Anyway, the smart money is starting to support wifi and wimax for mobile devices. It makes fiscal sense.

In a terrible case of me-too-ism, BlackBerry has come out with another version of the Pearl.

Except for one very important feature change.

It’s white!!!

Clap, clap.

How embarrassing, just a few days after the new iPhone, BlackBerry shows they aren’t afraid of pandering to style conscious to save their business.

I wonder if Penelope Cruz is going to buy one.

The mobile phone operator 3 has ended roaming charges in 7 countries.
This is a great step for mobile phones and 3 is really leading the way in the pervasiveness of mobile connections. Bravo.

Now the EU just needs to set price caps on the limits in EU countries.

It is hardly fair that you can be charged for using the same mobile within neighboring EU nations,.

I just got back from the Mobile Monday London event.

Some of the speakers were fairly interesting, although a bit too much stammering and faffing went on.  A bit more get up and go could be useful.

There were a couple things I found interesting.  They were talking about a Bubble 2.0.

I’m not really sure what that means, and I think that perhaps they should have agreed on what a “Bubble” is before they went into whether or not it was one.

Are some people going to make bad investments? Of course. Doesn’t that mean there is a Bubble, no… there are a lot of fools.  Some of which maybe didn’t learn anything from the last tech “bubble”, or “correction” or whatever you want to call it.

Are companies like CMGI popping up? No, that makes me think there is no Bubble.  That was a horrible idea.

But what about YouTube and MySpace?  They don’t exactly have sane and rational valuations…
But I really think they are one-offs.  There is too much VC money sitting on the sidelines to be hollering about a Bubble.  The fact that it is a topic of discussion shows that there are a lot of shitty ideas.
Most of the companies that demo-ed were… not surprisingly, crap.

I liked AdItOn  and I thought Reporo had some good ideas, if they were a bit narrow in focus.

The rest of them sucked.

Tonight is the Mobile Monday London meeting.  Last month I learned just how far the mobile communications industry has yet to evolve….

Tonight, hopefully, there will be some good speakers.  Last month was all about the Social Networking phenomena.  Boring… Apparently, a lot of people still have boners about YouTube and MySpace.  This fad is over, the next step will be giving people everything the want… quickly and for free…

Most of the business-folkl simply don’t “get it”.

Like Apple with their iPhone, they are taking the route of doing something safe and trapping a small percentage of the market.  Instead of creating a valuable product whose use could improve the state of the world.   One of the companies that presented last week, pinppl, is an example of just how ridiculous this has become.  They are targeting the BlackBerry users by figuring out a way to make their BlackBerry into a social networking device.  pinpple is doing this by sending instant messages, or PIN, as they are called..  to other BlackBerry users so that they can make friends.

Fundamental flaw… These are BlackBerry users, they don’t want friends, they want money!

Another presenter at the meeting said, and this is a paraphrase “40% of teenagers responded to unsolicited SMS”!?!

Really!?!?

That is the type of business model thought up by people pushing their caveman car with stone wheels and a brontosaurus steak on the side.

Yabba dabba doo!

I’m dying to hear what the champions of industry think up tonight.

I had been looking to see what kind of Mobile Voice Over IP clients were available and came across ConnectMeAnywhere. I tired the solution and had a very similar experience to Improbulus. Although their pitch and amount of press is impressive, the actual product is a kludge. Essentially, the user calls a number to get a voip call a destination numbers. So in essence you get extra hops in your calls and still wind up paying for them. You don’t pay long distance, that is the only value proposition I could find.

It is a very long way from the Mobile VOIP solution that I have envisioned, but enough ink has been spilled over the company to demonstrate that the market is ripe for development. All we need is the right innovator to come along.