I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

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[11:41:08] miles> Saw some interesting stuff recently on podcasting and 3G phones
[11:41:17] myself> oh yeah?
[11:42:41] myself> i saw there is a smartphone ipodder client now – http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware. but directory is messed up so i cant see the url
[11:43:35] miles> What the “What is?” – um, yes. Forget whose blog it was. Suggesting that podcasting might make sense with a 3G phone. Imagine a service that would download your podcasts for you, allowing you to retrieve them conveniently with your phone or other digital gadgets – not using something like iPodder: the service provider handles all of that work. You get the content you want all in one place.
[11:44:03] miles> A sort of podcast aggregator
[11:44:05] myself> humm now thats interesting
[11:44:18] myself> found it by the way – http://www.equin.co.uk/ipoddersp/
[11:44:32] miles> It makes podcasts more viable, too, because the podcasters wouldn't get soaked for bandwidth
[11:44:53] myself> yeah and orange and the like will enjoy being in the loop
[11:44:53] miles> Cool!
[11:45:13] myself> i've not used pocketrss2 with 3g yet
[11:45:20] myself> but that would work too
[11:45:27] miles> Exactly – they can make money off it, and profile their customers' tastes too
[11:45:41] myself> ah now thats true
[11:47:59] miles> http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/11#podcastingMayBeTheirKillerApp
[11:48:05] miles> That was it, I think
[11:50:17] miles> It's because the American low-end telephony approach isn't shiny enough – but this would work better for a 3G service than a low-end GPRS phone. Plus you could do more with a modern terminal
[11:51:45] myself> yes, this handset i'm using has streaming and very tightly intergrated mediaplayer

[11:52:24] miles> Spot on. If it had MP3/OGG streaming support it would be perfect

So I go off and try and test downloading and streaming content on my phone. The results are not good. First finding a nice easy to type feed. http://www.di.fm will do. Ok great, page will not load on my phone correctly. Try http://www.shoutcast.com. Not much better, so i resort to typing in the direct url. Works but does not know what a *.pls or *.m3u file is Unsupported content type. Ok so I try going to the direct mp3 file. I get this error – HTTP Error: 413 Request too large. I think I'm going about it all the wrong way, maybe the media needs to be embeded into a page or be in a special format. So I go to the Orange world home page and check out the film clips in the 3g highlights section. As expected there is an option to download and to stream. With both, it swiches to the mediaplayer and asks to download or prepares the stream. Have to say the stream is good, only 5 secs wait before it started playing. Hummmm, so I need to look at what there using in that wap page to launch the mediaplayer. The link to stream is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp80s&sid98bddc0e8231 and the download is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp94&sid98bddc0e8231, but I think you need to be on there connection for it to work?

Anyway the other thing I wanted to point at was the link to ipodderSP I sent to miles about a podcasting client on the smartphone. I gave up my SPV to my wife so I just missed out, but wow ipodderSP looks like just the job. For now, i'm quite happy listening to podcasts on my ipaq than anything else but i'm happy to see even more podcast clients coming to the pocketpc.

more to come….

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