Category: technology

Is the mobile phone industry ready for the pure web?

Mark Surman @ Campus Party BR 2013

The biggest mobile phone trade faire kicks off in the ever so lovely Barcelona, and the analysis seems to suggest this year it will be about all the mobile platforms tearing down Android and iOS.

My favourites have to be Mobile Ubuntu which I have written about in the past and Firefox OS, which Gigaom has written about.

Love the concept of Firefox OS but interestingly there seems to be a lot of support for Firefox OS from the mobile phone industry. Last time I saw this level of support it was for Android.

From an open standards perspective, the Firefox OS is as pure as it gets right now. The whole thing is based on HTML5 – it’s all about escaping Google and Apple’s walled gardens and frolicking freely in the wilds of the open web. Half the code was written by volunteers.

There will be an official Firefox Marketplace but everyone is free to roll their own, from carriers to games specialists. Any payment method can be implemented – that factor is not in the hands of any one platform sponsor. Apps that run on the platform will also be able to run on rivals that implement HTML5, such as Google’s and Apple’s.

Although I do still ask the question of the mobile phone industry, are you ready to give people the pure web?

So back we come to this idea of the open mobile web. This is an area where luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee have been on the warpath, pointing out very real problems with the iOS/Android model. These include the inability to share app-based content in a standardized way, and the inability to search across apps. In short: the loss of the level playing field that web technologies represent.

Firefox OS is designed to solve those problems. Weirdly, we can now witness the former walled garden proprietors genuinely extol the virtues of openness. By promoting Firefox OS, they cannot regain control – however, they hope to prise some control from the hands of Google and Apple.

Well I guess we shall see how far Firefox OS gets. Like Ubuntu, my contract is up this year so I could be tempted to switch to one of these phones. Although I’ll be honest and say Google’s extra features are pretty compelling, specially Google Now.

The romance contraceptive?

DSC_0576

Been reading up lots of stuff about dating and social media recently…

One of the most interesting ones has to be this entry from David Wygant a dating and relationship coach and writes for the New York Times.

Social media is what I’d call a romance contraceptive. It prevents romance from happening every single day.

Every day when I’m out and about, I’ll see people in elevators, I’ll see people in grocery stores, coffee shops, and at restaurants. And they’re all checking Facebook! Or they’re tweeting something to their 3.7 followers. We’ve become a society of people who are obsessed with what’s happening in the imaginary world.

Just the other day, I was in a supermarket in Los Angeles and I saw this guy checking out this girl. He was standing next to her in line at the juice bar. He kept looking at her, and she kept looking down … at the Facebook app on her iPhone.

Now, I know some of you right now are thinking, maybe she wasn’t interested. That wasn’t the issue. Because what I’m about to share with you is something most of you have probably done.

He gave up and disappeared. But I was crazy curious so I stood next to her in line and got real close and peeked at what she was typing into her phone.

Her status update: When am I going to meet a nice guy? It seems like all the good men are taken.

Think about what just happened.

She complained about not finding good men, but here was an interested man, standing next to her. Now, granted, nobody knows if the romance would have worked, but think about this: for every moment that you’re checking your Twitter feed, or your so-called friends’ updates on Facebook, you’re missing another opportunity to connect with somebody in real life … which could be another opportunity to fall in love.

I agree to a certain extend. I already gave a 5min presentation to #smc_mcr urging people to do more in real life. Don’t get me wrong, I also sometimes say “I got to tweet this…” but generally I’m not attached to my phone like some people I know.

We are in a world of flux right now, for some people mobile internet access is a good thing and for others its certainly not. Do you blame the technology or the person? I would say its the person.

Want To Make A Dating App That Actually Works?

Crazy Blind Date

With all the thinking about maybe joining the mobile dating challenge, I remembered seeing this…

Want To Make A Dating App That Actually Works? Design It For The Ladies

Online dating has matured from Internet fringe activity to full-blown phenomenon. Online dating apps? Less so. With the exception of the wildly popular Grindr, hooking up via your smartphone has been an anathema to app developers and a hazard to those looking for mates, a kind of no-man’s-land between skeeze city and sociopath village. “Another day, another creepy mobile app,” observed the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, writing about the spectacularly creepy Girls Around Me app.

There’s a really low perceived value for dating apps right now,” agrees Gene Liebel, chief strategy officer at Brooklyn digital agency Huge and the force behind CrazyBlindDate, a mobile app for OkCupid that launched yesterday. “There’s a lot of failure in this space. But being first to market a thing is overrated. We spent some time on this, and I think in this case, we got it right.”

I actually quite like the idea of Crazy Blind Date.

Crazy blind date reminds me of a cross between OKcupid’s Locale and How about we. Not sure if this is designed for ladies but per-se but I can imagine women being a little more comfortable than whats currently on the market.

If you build it for women, the thinking went, the men will come (the reverse, historically, hasn’t worked so well). “We figure men will endure a little more pain,” says Liebel. “So everything, from the design to the algorithm, is geared to giving women a successful dating experience.” That meant building an infrastructure of safe public places to populate the location list, a safety net against dates gone wrong. It also meant putting the focus on meeting more men, in smaller doses–a romantic test drive to see if things click, rather than weeks of online browsing and messaging

 

Put your git repo where your mouth is?

GitHub

I like this idea from Martin Rue… startupsmanchester.com

The idea is pretty simple. Assuming you have a git repo for your project, you simply register your project/startup on the site and you’ll get a post-commit git hook script. Drop this script into your repo’s .git/hooks directory and it’ll start sharing your progress with the rest of the community each time you commit.

It doesn’t share anything sensitive and stores only the commit message, the commit author name and a count of the files changed. It also calculates some basic stats for each project to give a better idea of how much continual work is happening on the project.

Now we’ll all be able to see who’s actually doing stuff and who’s just talking. Maybe seeing 3 or 4 other startups doing lots of stuff will even encourage you to keep up the pace. It certainly will for me!

As he says, “put your git repo where your mouth is…”

The worm of things

I remember ages ago my manager at the time Miles, talking about a scenario where one turned on phone on a flight from another country. Kick starts a virus/worm in another country. This was around the time of Nimda worm which was one of the prolific viruses/worms to date.

Nimda is a computer worm, also a file infector. It quickly spread, surpassing the economic damage caused by previous outbreaks such as Code Red. Nimda utilized several types of propagation technique and this caused it to become the Internet’s most widespread virus/worm within 22 minutes.

What is worrying is the amount of devices in the internet of things which could be passengers or infected…

 Over millennia we humans evolved a powerful and personal instinct — trust — that helps to protect us as we make our way through life. It is a vital tool for survival in the physical world and weaves the fabric of our society. When we are in a relationship based on trust we are less vulnerable, which in turn allows us to collaborate and to be creative. Trust is also context specific — you trust your mechanic to fix your car, but probably not to manage your bank account. This is the principle of “need to know”: in each context only information that is needed for that context is available, and nothing more.

CES 2013: Internet of Everything

CES this year seemed to be a fascinating one… mainly because the internet of things really broke through this year.

No longer just an expression used when people are talking about items they don’t understand, oh no were talking serious business at long last.

However there was also the ugly… Summed up by Qualcomm’s keynote, covered by the verge and many others…

A night of cringeworthy conversations, product demos, and music

But back to the good… This was certainly the year ioT went big and forbes have a nice summary,

Other than Ulta HDTVs, running $20,000 and up, there was no particularly brand new technology announcement that screamed “I am the future” but the sum of the parts screamed “Wow… this Internet thing has opened the door for a generation of products that no one could have imagined.”

HTC One X Jelly Bean update at last!

My thoughts about the HTC One X has changed slightly…

The One X is HTC’s flagship phone for the first half of 2012. It features a highly-acclaimed Super LCD2 720p screen, which many consider to be the best display on a mobile phone to date. The international version of the One X ships with a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU processor that is backed by a full gigabyte of RAM and 32 gigs of flash memory. The device’s software is also notable. The One X comes pre-loaded with Android 4.0.3, featuring the HTC Sense 4 user interface, which marked the slimming of their previously heavy custom skin.

As noted above its an incredible phone but crippled with HTC software and a non-removable battery. I was planning to root it and put Jelly bean on but on the day of the rooting, I saw messages from Chris Hernon on Twitter.

Looked at my phone and there was an update. After that update was applied there was a big 63meg update for Android 4.1.3 aka Jelly Bean! Although I’m very happy about the update, I’m still shocked it took 8 months for the upgrade and its not even 4.2 which luckily doesn’t seem to have much changes. At this rate this means Android 4.3 Keylime pie won’t be sent over the air to my phone till next year! Don’t worry I will have rooted it by then, specially now I’ve almost unlocked the bootloader

The other difference is I’ve stopped using Locale. Its a fantastic app but I’ve found something which is does most of the things I want and doesn’t chew through the limited battery.I tried Llama and didn’t get on with it but Profile scheduler looks perfect for me. I do wish it had as many plugins as Locale but frankly I’ll take a battery which lasts a day over 4hours any day.

So I can happily say not only is the phone bloody fast (thats the butter), has a battery which lasts and now also has Google Now!

Ubuntu as a mobile operating system

Ubuntu Mobile

The rumors were true… Ubuntu released a mobile operating system not just a way to hook up your Android phone to Ubuntu. I always thought the Unity interface could work on mobile as well as TV.

A full video can be found here. and OMG!Ubuntu have a nice look at the features including a hangout with lots more answers…

Love the fact its trying to take off where webOS may have failed with the Ubuntu Webapp.

Amazon Glacier

Mouth of the Matanuska Glacier - Alaska

I love the idea of Amazon Glacier…

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

This is how I use SpiderOak right now. All backups stored there in deep storage just in-case… It will also be a great place to store photos, videos and old projects… Oh and it seems to work for UK users too.

Great work Amazon… I’m going to see if Spideroak offer anything like this before switching. As I could easily use Dropbox for daily stuff and Amazon Glacier for everything else.

A win for openness

Android on a Camera

This camera by Nikon is a win for openness, google and of course android

The first mainstream digital camera to be powered by Google’s Android system has been released by Nikon. The Japanese company’s point-and-shoot Coolpix S800c model is being marketed as a “social imaging device”. Demand for compact cameras has suffered because of the rise of smartphones.

Is it ugly? Maybe a little…

Is it fascinating and a wonderful combination? Yes…

Google always wanted Android everywhere and it started happening a while ago. Now this is just a logical extension of where digital cameras may go. Instead of some crazy proprietary embedded operating system, why not Android?