Churn Faster!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
There’s number portability, and there’s number portability.
Last time I changed phone providers, it took over a week for my number to follow me to my new phone. We’re living in a world of personalised communications, where our mobile numbers are as much a part of our identity as out primary email addresses, and a week of number limbo is a long time.
Things look set to change, and OFCOM is on the case.
From September 2009 number portability should take only two hours. Switching operators should be a simple process, where you buy a new phone, turn it on, and your personal number follows you to your new device. It’s a process that should mean more people start following the coolest devices from network to network - as other OFCOM rulings mean that competition between networks will lead to devices being the only differentiating factor.
Of course the increasing length of contracts is going to have an impact - but number portability will mean that businesses should have the upper hand in any contract negotiations with their providers. If you can just up and take all your business numbers with you, your account manager is more likely to listen to your concerns - and the operator will be more likely to offer the services your business needs, rather than the services that are cheapest to offer.
It’s interesting to look at the effects of fast number portability on markets like Hong Kong, where competitive pressures have led to extremely low contract costs - and where consumers chose networks based on the devices offered - and business look at the services. Mobile telephony is becoming a commodity, just like landlines, and operators will need to move themselves up the value chain in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Certainly if operators don’t do something fast then they’re likely to be in the same place as the music industry is today. Big changes are already underway: in the US Google is bidding for a slice of the 700MHz spectrum. Meanwhile, Apple has already asserted its control over AT&T (and the European iPhone networks), by separating the device experience from the network. It’s all adding up to a future where mobile operators are increasingly irrelevant.
One response is coming from Verizon, which has just announced that it will open its network up to any device. That’s a brave move, but one that means they can move out of the handset business, leave that to the manufacturers (along with the support costs!), and can concentrate on building out and improving the network and the network services. That’s where Verizon’s strengths are - it’s a network. The phones are access devices that can come from anywhere and anyone. As long as they meet the standards, they should be able to connect…
So who’s going to be first to offer the same service in the UK?
–Simon
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Distributing the Anti iPhone
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
At the FiRE conference in San Diego, back in May, the science fiction wtiter and TV presenter David Brin set a group of CTOs a challenge. The men behind the technology decisions at EMC, Adobe and IBM were challenged to rethink the phone - completely.
The results were surprising - with the CTOs coming up with a phone that wasn’t one device, or one software platform, but a tool for brining together the many different portable devices we carry, and the many software services we use. All the information, all the ethnographic studies, all the ergonomic research they had told them one thing: “one size fits all” wasn’t enough, and it never would be. The trend to converged devices like Apple’s iPhone may suit the manufacturers, but it won’t suit the users.
Discrete devices got the same thumbs down. A Windows Mobile phone and a Zune sat in a bag are another technological dead end. They may be perfectly capable tools, with plenty of communications options - but they can’t work together. That’s another pitfall, as best of breed and jack of all trades struggle to support increasingly demanding users. We want it all - and we want it now.
It’s worth going back in time a decade or so, to the ubiquitous computing research of people like the late Mark Weiser. Xerox PARC labs was at the forefront of work in building prototype ubiquitous computing systems. Computing was going to be everywhere, Moore’s Law would see to that - so the big question was how it would fit together and fade into the background. PARC defined a set of communicating devices - from UI-less tabs that sat in a pocket or attached to other pieces of hardware, to communicating, informing pads, and the massive displays of walls. These were all linked together, taking information in and sharing it around the network.
Ubiquitous computing is about more than separate devices that need to be synchronised by a desktop PC - it’s about finding ways to let the devices interact. Apple has made a (pun intended) step in the right direction with its Nike shoe sensor and iPod integration, but that’s only part of the story. Runners are struggling to bring the information from that pairing to the route mapping tools from companies like Garmin, where GPS sensors plot out a run on Google Maps. Now imagine the benefit to a training regime of a set of linked sensors and services that not only plot routes and times, but also pace length and heart rates.
That’s the world the CTOs came up with. It’s a world where the phone acts as a communications hub, but other devices provide elements of the user interface, and remote services add computing power that small form factor devices can’t provide.
You can take that viewpoint and spin it out further, to 20 years from now when Western countries are struggling to support an ageing population., Distributed devices can help people maintain an independent life, while still providing doctors with information on physical capabilities and adherence to drug regimes. It’s a big brother world, but more like the American Big Brother organisations, where adult role models seek to inspire and educate. Tomorrow’s big brother phone will connect you to the world, and help you take advantage of the tools and services the digital world provides.
A brave new world indeed, but one without the solid lump of an iPhone in your pocket.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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The thing about those lost CDs…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Security on
It’s not so much that the CDs went missing with vast amount of data. It’s not that it makes any difference to how likely you
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Can HTC take Advantage of Eee-fans?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
But it’s not going to get the same public reaction because instead of Linux, it runs Windows Mobile. It’s the HTC Advantage and I reviewed it at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/133941/htc-advantage-x7500.html; I was minded to bring it up after all the interest in the Eee PC because in some ways it’s a better solution.
You can create and edit office documents; the latest version of Office Mobile in WM 6 lets you create charts and you get full file compatibility with Office. You can get HTML email. You can run Opera. The QWERTY keyboard is a nice size for typing - but if you want to draw on screen or read an eBook with Microsoft Reader or play a game with the stylus you can pull the keyboard off because it’s magnetic. OneNote Mobile works best with a keyboard but PhatNotes lets you write on screen nicely. You can hook it up to a TV and play video; it’s got a full media player built in and there are other players available.
It’s got a VGA screen and although WM 6 doesn’t do much with that you can download SE_VGA (http://www.pocketpcfreewares.com/en/index.php?soft=1277) or ozVGA (http://oz.sciox.org/) to get the full resolution; this causes problems with some icons and it’s not a perfect solution but neither is having to scroll down to get the bottom stripe of the screen on the Eee PC running Windows XP (widescreen ratio at the lowest resolution and smallest size = something missing).
It’s got GPS and it makes a fantastic personal navigator with CoPilot 7 - and even using the GPS, with the phone switched on and a non-roaming SIM in (which means the radio is ramped up to full power, trying again and again to find a network that will talk it) you get over three hours of battery life. It charges over USB so you can easily charge it in the car from the cigarette lighter and in use without GPS you’ll get six to eight hours of push email and browsing over 3G, intermittent Wi-Fi and application use plus phone calls. Yes - it’s a phone too, although you’ll want to use a headset because it’s like holding a paperback book up to your ear.
It’s a phone, a PDA, a navigator, a personal media player, a note taker, a presentation runner - it’s a real portable computer. Depending on the contract it could easily be cheaper than the Eee PC as well as lasting for longer and fitting in a smaller pocket. What matters with the Eee PC for me is having a real OS - Windows or Linux - so you can add your own applications. But the Eee PC only has 4Gb of storage; the Advantage has 8Gb plus an SD slot and much more of that is free because the OS is in ROM. Unless there’s a specific app you want on the Eee, the Advantage might be the portable of your dreams instead.
-Mary
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HD Trek
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Next week sees the arrival of the remastered original Star Trek series on HD DVD. We saw a check disk of it a while back, and were astounded at the quality of those 1960s images. You could see the patterns in the mesh of Spock’s space suit in a scene set in a frozen scientific outpost, surrounded by dead showroom dummies.
HD video is starting to go where no man has gone before on its own. We wrote back in May about the plan to place HD cameras a mile or so down below the surface of the Pacific, monitoring black smokers - and delivering the live imagery over the LambdaGrid high-speed academic network (which sadly failed to agree merger terms with Internet2 earlier this week).
Now it’s in space too, as the Japanese KAGUYA (which translates as Selene) lunar orbiter is carrying one of the first space-rated HDTV cameras. The probe is still in shakedown, but has started sending back some spectacular imagery.
JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has turned some of the imagery into two rather wonderful movies - one of Earthrise, and one of Earthset.
We’ve grown up with grainy episodes of Star Trek and even grainier Apollo television pictures, It’s good to finally get a HD look at another world for the first time - whether it’s a mile below the ocean, or a quarter of a million miles away, orbiting a hunk of rock…
HD’s on its way to the Internet, too. Microsoft’s Silverlight supports HD codecs, and Flash will soon join the HD scene (just in time for YouTube to decide one way or the other). It’s also on the way to the familiar DIVX video codec, as the San Diego company just bought a German codec development house that specialises in H. 264. Whether we’re using Silverlight, Flash or DIVX it looks certain that we’ll be looking at some form of HD video.If only we had the bandwidth to deliver it to the home…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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The best mobile game ever
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Futures, Windows Mobile, Hardware, HP, Wireless, Mobile on
It’s dark. The South Bank is brightly lit, but Jubilee Gardens is a dark stretch of grass between the London Eye and the road, with only an avenue of trees garlanded with fairy lights for illumination. And there’s five of us with one iPAQ Traveller, one camera, one backup set of paper instructions, three GPS-labelled mole holes and ten moles to whack. And we’ve forgotten which hole is which. Is this the future of mobile gaming? I hope so, because it’s huge fun.
The London Girl Geek Dinners are a mobile feast, meeting wherever the technology company sponsoring the evening suggests. This time it was upstairs at the British Film Institute, and the serious business of the evening was Helen Vaid, managing director of HP’s Snapfish photo printing service in Europe talking about being an entrepreneur and balancing that with working for a large company and Jo Reid of HP’s Bristol research labs talking about some of the projects she’s worked on, including mscape.
Reid has a vision of pervasive computing overlaying a digital layer on the world around us. Geotagging is one way to do it, but that’s after the fact and away from the place. Geocaching is another, but the GPS is a tool that you use like a map rather than part of the fun. Short for Mediscape, mscapes are games, stories and guides triggered by your location; they run on an iPAQ Traveller, which is a Windows Mobile 5 device with a built-in GPS - so it knows when you’re in the right place to give you clues, directions and instructions and when to record your score. Think scavenger hunt or virtual hide and seek
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Not very open, not very social
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Networking on
I’ve been looking at Google’s OpenSocial, and to be honest, I’m not particularly impressed. There is a need for a way of bringing the spiraling maelstrom of social networks into some coherent, cohesive whole. I can see how easy it is for people staring at the headlights of the oncoming Facebook juggernaut to want to seize hold of the first possible escape route - it’s just a pity that OpenSocial came along first.
Yes, OpenSocial can be used to extract information from different web sites and bring them together, but it’s missing many of the features that would make it truly compelling.
Firstly, and critically, there’s no identity component to OpenSocial. All it is is a set of simple API calls that extract all the information that’s available. There’s no way for a data provider to control just who sees what and how,it’s an all or nothing system. The simplistic model that OpenSocial currently offers means there’s no way for me to set a set of rules that expose information in different ways for different people, which is something that’s critical when sharing information across sites - which is something that I see as vitally important, and I’m someone living what can best be described as a “radically transparent” online life.
Identity and relationship are where social networking falls apart. “Friend” has become the most overloaded word I can think of - even more than “sorry”. You might be my social networking “friend”, but what does that really mean? Are you someone I’ve known since primary school, or are you just someone I met at a conference once? I know - but the OpenSocial network doesn’t. There are things about myself that the first person would automatically see, but the second would have to build up a lot of trust before I let them know anything personal.
Secondly, it’s not really a tool for bringing sites and applications together. It’s a tool for building yet more widgets to clutter up our web sites. You can make widgets blend in with site branding, but looking at the horror that is a MySpace profile page, can you imagine someone actually letting that happen? Widgets are all about owning and delivering your brand experience on top of someone else’s. No Widget framework is immune to this - the same is true of Yahoo!’s Widgets, the Apple Dashboard and the Microsoft Sidebar, and yes, even iGoogle (which forms the backbone for much of OpenSocial’s API).
OpenSocial is really the OpenWidget platform. That’s a good thing, but it’s not what we’re being sold. I have to admit, it’s certainly not my thing. I may not like widgets, I may not have a pimped out MySpace page with all the bells and whistles, but there are plenty of people who want that. It’s what they’ll get, in spades, from OpenSocial. It’s just not what the hype is promising.
So what’s needed?
I can’t rip OpenSocial to pieces without offering an alternative. There is a need for a tool to open up and share the social graph, as it would give us the ability to build rich applications that could change peoples’ lives.
This is my shopping list.
A rich, permissions-based identity layer. My applications need to know who you are and what you want - and what I’m prepared to give you.
A strong relationship definition language. Let the semantic web folk go to town here, and build the ontologies we need. Just make it easy for me to define the relationship I want to define.
A common data model (or at least a central map). I want to be able to bring together information from Dopplr, from Upcoming, from LinkedIn, from Facebook. I want to be able to know that when I go to a place, I’ll know what’s happening there, who’s going to be there, who I should network with for my career, and who with and where I should hang out in the evening. Oh, and what’s good to eat.
That’s what the open social graph should give us. Not another set of bloody annoying widgets with badly written AJAX animations and Web 2.0 pretensions. In the face of Web 2.0’s Facebook fear, it’s what we’ve been doomed to.
Badger, badger, badger.
–Simon
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Does a Google phone mean a cheaper phone? No.
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
After all the rumours of a hardware Google phone - plausible with the man behind the Sidekick running the project but never likely because of the six months notice required for testing new phones
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Highlights and low flights
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
My trip to IFA was like one of the jokes that go on for hours.
The good news was I saw some really interesting products, had an argument about wheher Dell counts as innovative (feel free to convince me but I see them as the ultimate, though good value, beige box), found the hotel Internet connection well set up and used it to get checked in ready to come home. I still consider 22 euros for 24 hours somewhere the wrong side of extortionate (17 euros if you don’t want to connect a second laptop or a PDA and you know you won’t need more than 400MB of connection), but what I really liked about the Swisscom setup is that every time I connected in the room it reminded me of my user name and password for using wireless in the lobby and suggested
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