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

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.

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 are to have your identity stolen. It’s not that the database stores key personal information like National Identity numbers (sorry, it’s still ‘National Insurance’, right?). It’s not even that the system allows anyone - junior or not - to download an entire database and work with it offline when best practices say work with live data or a limited local set. It’s not even that the interoffice mail system doesn’t automatically include tracking.

It’s that the interoffice mail system is run by TNT.

They’re couriers: of course they lost it! I’m not singling out TNT from the pack as almost *all* couriers do a lousy job. We have packages delivered and collected regularly here - often several in one day. We’re still waiting for a collection that was due in August and another from last week. Often the courier company can’t tell me when the driver will arrive, the driver can’t read a printed label on a door bell and instead of a delivery or collection I get a little piece of paper and a lengthy wait. I’ve had boxes opened and the contents removed - the empty box arrived though! I’ve had only six of seven boxes arrive at the other end (and be signed for as a full consignment). I’ve had urgent requests for items that were collected by the courier company and never delivered or delivered ’somewhere’ that can’t now be located. Tracking numbers help, but almost every friend I can remember buying from Apple has watched their shipment fly around the world rather than route straight to them. I know a friend who had a courier company ‘lose’ a whole server for three days; I know people who’ve found their parcel at the courier company being used as a doorstop or a footrest.

My first word association for ‘courier’ is unreliable; my second is unregulated. How hard is it to get a job with a courier company? What security checks get done?

There’s a vast amount of theft that doesn’t get perpetrated that would be very simple: why don’t more bags just get taken off luggage carousels? Why don’t more parcels go missing en route? Assuming that people are basically honest and that the workers are paid enough for it not to be worthwhile is one thing. But if I wanted to go into a criminal line of work, getting a job in a courier company strikes me as a fantastic way to start social engineering.

Before you put me down as a conspiracy nut, I’m not suggesting that the HMRC data was stolen to order, or that all courier drivers are dishonest or moles in waiting, or that the CDs are anywhere worse than fallen down behind a filing cabinet. But not to have considered whether any of that is likely is a failure of security and process (and security is a process rather than a state). And not to have specified tracking for every single delivery implies that there are some deliveries you care about and some things you don’t mind losing and you trust the same people who are already breaking rules by sending a whole database out to know the difference.

For any junior civil servants needing to send something too large to fit in email (and I do hope that email is encrypted rather than the electronic postcards most of us send), can I suggest a Web upload site? I use www.yousendit.com. The free account has no security at all so if you can guess the URL in seven days you can see the last Process Monitor trace file I sent to Microsoft. But if you can persuade your boss to pay for the $30 per month Business Plus acount you can upload files to a password protected site; set the file to expire automatically after as few hours as you think it will take for the person you send it to to remember to log in with their password-protected account and download it using the password that you give them seprately; limit the number of downloads - and get an email when they do download it so you can stop worrying about what to tell the boss.

I would suggest that the government could build its own secure data transfer network using encrypted disks on secured servers protected by anti-virus and firewalls instead of relying on a company like YouSendIt to have done a good job on its own security. But I’d worry they’d only outsource it to a courier company to do it for them.

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

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…

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…  It’s harder to explain than it is to do and that’s how we spend 90 minutes before the main meeting, in teams of five, in the dark, running up and down the Embankment.

We head out of the BFI into the cold, trying to listen to the instructions as they go - full volume is still too quiet but Jo Reid has already told us the basics. We get a GPS signal as we pass the National Theatre and a clue pops up on screen. Unfortunately I don’t stop in time and we walk out of range and walking in circles watching the little figure on the map approach the push pin where the clue should be doesn’t bring it back up. We give up on the first clue for now and head for the next pushpin; we think it’s going to be the pier but it shows up as we pass an ad hoarding: who did Avril say See you Later to? We pore over the hoarding by the light of the iPAQ screen and then realise the answer is just a little further on at the skate park.

Up pops a message on screen to climb the stairs; this could have saved me half an hour waiting for my sister in the summer when we discovered our interpretations of ‘in front of the Royal Festival Hall’ differed by a height of some 20 feet. Outside the RFH the game asks us to enact a scene from Misdummer Night’s Dream; here Simon is the Wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe kiss.

There are more questions as we walk down towards the London Eye, answered by looking on lamp posts, sculptures and the poetry in the paving stones. The 5-15m accuracy of GPS means that sometimes I have to stand in the right place to see the question while the rest of the team wanders around looking for the right place to see the answer; we resort to Google to find out what to look for one occasion. And then as we get to Jubilee Gardens the map shows two ‘agility’ challenges and a logic puzzle and this is when we start running around in the dark.

Ben takes the first agility challenge, which is holding the iPAQ up to his chest to record his heart rate, taking 25 long strides and then running back and forth at shorter and shorter intervals until the game asks for a second heart rate and gives him a high score. He lights up a cigarette to celebrate and we try the logic puzzle. This is a combination of Battleship, Boggle and Mastermind as we mark a playing area, hunt for unexploded bombs that are randomly positioned and have to be found by GPS and disarmed by solving a colour code or making words from letters - and get blown up three times. We keep getting the colour code puzzle and we keep getting it wrong. In the end we give up and try Whack a Mole.

This is much simpler; we pick three spots not too close together as mole holes, station the photographer to catch us in action and when the game says there’s a mole at hole one the runner dashes there with the GPS and taps the screen to whack the mole. Repeat for all ten moles and then rush back to record our final time and have the scores read from the devices…

The games and questions aren’t taxing - though I want to have another go at UXB in the daylight after I’ve practiced Mastermind a few more times - but they’re involving and the time limit keeps you going. If you’ve got a Windows Mobile device with GPS you can download several mscapes including UXB and Whack a Mole as well as a game for escaping from the Tower of London and a ranger-guided hike through Yosemite from http://www.mscapers.com/home; you can also get the software for making your own mscapes.

Second Life and virtual worlds don’t appeal to me because the real world is so rich and in-world always seems a quantised second best - IM with a fancy screen saver. Mediascapes and what I think of as place coding adds virtual experiences to the real world; it could be an adventure game with prizes, a guided tour that knows what building you’ve reached even if you take the wrong turn, restaurant reviews for the restaurant you’re standing in front of… I’d like it to link to Linked In or Facebook for my friends and Dopplr or online calendars for where they are and pop up an IM window if they’re within getting-together distance. I could get bus and train timetables as I get close to the bus stop or station. Post It notes for the real world. And a really fun way to spend a cold evening. Try it out - and if you work out the colour code puzzle, come play a game with us some time.

-Mary

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

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  - Android turns out to be a special version of the same software Google has been making for phones all along - and will continue to make. The Google phone software stack treads a fine line between taking away the hard work of compatibility testing from the operators and taking away their advertising revenue and data business model. But don’t expect free software to mean cheaper phones.

Handset manufacturers don’t pay a lot for the operating system they use - £1 to £2 per phone for Symbian and £4 to £8 per Windows Mobile device. And they make orders of magnitude more money back from you because smartphone users make more calls, send more texts and pay for a data tariff too (although they won’t sniff at a little extra profit on each handset).

What costs the most money in a phone is the radio and the more your phone does the more radios it needs -  GSM for phone calls, GRPS/EDGE and 3G for data plus Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and sometimes GPS. Soon you can add in WiMax or LTE as we get the still faster 4G services, but first 3G phone will get cheaper as they get more popular and economies of scale kick in. Analysts Informa reckon that by 2008 the component costs for a 3G smartphone will be down to around £55. That’s not what you pay for a phone - there’s still the cost of manfacturing, marketing, support and making a profit on the one hand and the subsidy the network operator pays to get phones out cheaply or for free - but it makes the cost of the OS just a small part of the total.

The component bill will drop to £30 by 2012. By then up to a quarter of phones worldwide  will have the fastest variants of 3G or 4G radios- but that adds up as nearly 90% of devices in South Korea, Japan and Western Europe. That’s despite the fact that the radios are more complex to build and test so they’ll stay more expensive, with a £75 price tag for components in 2012.

Another thing that costs money is giving wireless networks the bandwidth they need to make mobile Internet worth using. Mobile broadband is going to see traffic increasing by 30% or 40% every year if Ovum’s figures are right.

That puts the pennies the operators can save by going with Google in context. A fifth of the phones sold already go to China where homegrown search services are more popular so the Google name may not help much.  And if Google is thinking about matching the iPhone figures it should set its sights a little higher. Last year Microsoft sold 11 million Windows Mobile phone - up from 6 million the previous year and 3 million the year before that - and it’s on track to shift 20 million more by July 2008. If that brings anything like the £160 million the figures suggest, Microsoft may not mind how many of those users are searching with Google.

-Mary

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 I drag it as a snippet to the desktop for reference.

The bad news was that checked in and stuffed with tidbits of information, like Toshiba promising to add HD DVD drives to low-end notebooks like the Satellite range, I got to the airport to discover the flight home had been cancelled.

The good news was I got through to the travel agent and rebooked the flight while I was still 70 people back in the queue for the ticket desk (because I’d copied the number of the person to call into the appointment in Outlook, so it drifted automatically across to my phone).

The bad news was the new flight was at 6.15am and went to Stansted rather than Heathrow.

The good news was I could go home by train.

I want to say that technology saved the day, because I found the details of the overnight train to Brussels and the onward Eurostar to London on the excellent Seat 61 site, with pictures of the sleeper coaches and departure times from the two main stations in Berlin. The bad news was that it was too late to book a seat online or by phone and despite being told that there were plenty of sleeper berths left, I rushed off to the train station and discovered there weren’t any. Obviously there’s a limit to just in time systems, but if an airline can have a seat map for checking in, why can’t a sleeper train show me whether I’ll be able to get any sleep.

Back to the airport and things turned into a species of farce with hotels that had had no rooms when I left discovering plenty of rooms, a shuttle bus that could only be summoned from an office that was now closed and a taxi driver who logically enough presumed that however mad the English are, the three of us couldn’t possibly want to take a taxi to a hotel right next to the airport and took us to the next nearest hotel of the same name. By the time I got the right side of dinner I’d been to the same airport three times in one evening.

Despite the train disappointment, the real good news was how much I managed to get done from my smartphone while rushing around; arranging review items, courier pickups and deliveries, phone interviews, flights for our upcoming visit to the US and updating friends and family with my swiftly changing travel plans. The other big disappointment was discovering that despite the runway closure that caused the cancellation having hit the BBC News site before lunchtime, BA hadn’t notified me at any point before I got to the airport that there was any kind of problem. Given that a weekend flight to Jersey generated four emails offering travel tips and asking for my opinion, just a little more notice could have let me come home by train after all.
-Mary (no longer in Berlin)