There’s been some recent discussions around contact syncing and particularly issues wiht the HTC Hero’s latest update. Mark Watts-Jones had a rather embarrassing moment he shared on twitter and it made me think about the whole issue of keeping mobile device information current.

(more…)

Mel Kirk posted an question on twitter earlier about price comparison sites and it got me thinking about my online shopping habits.

(more…)

I recently managed to get my wife to become a regular user of mobile data, great I thought this stuff is finally getting mainstream traction, Until we got this months bill…

(more…)

We had a very interesting discussion at OpenMIC 2 today, I put the topic up as “Lets Design the Perfect Mobile Data Charging Model” quite a daunting task but I thought it might attract attention
(more…)

So the G1 is out, I’ve had a chance to play with one in a T-Mobile store and it seems like a nice OS, however it doesn’t look like an iPhone killer yet.
Lets take a look at some of the points I’ve picked up on.
(more…)

Its been a long time since I last wrote a proper post and I doubt this will be that, however having just spent the afternoon chatting with the guys at carsonifiedabout whats happening in the mobile industry I’m feeling all inspired.

Currently I’m sat in Starbucks in Bath and I’m using my Orange Mobile Broadband dongle to get online, quite frankly its great! Whilst I loved the idea of Wifi hotspots in Starbucks (coffee & the web my 2 favorite things) I very rarely used them. Why? well mostly it came down to cost & usablity. Paying per minute for wifi is just plain crazy and especially at the rates TMobile charge. Mobile Broadband dongles are availble for around £15 per month and that gets you about 3 gig of data, whilst that may not seem much if your comparing it to a home broadband subscription its plenty for using a laptop on the go. I suppose I could get a subscription to TMobile’s hotspot but I really don’t want to as it feels like a lot of hassle and wouldn’t work everywhere.
Ok so full disclosure time I work for Orange and don’t pay for my mobile broadband but when I leave I think I will get one and pay the bill for it!
The usability is spot on, Orange have even created a Mac client so I just fire up the software, plug in the stick and click connect, The odd time I’m tried to use a paid hotspot its been a real mess of trying to get the connection, then open a browser, wait for the re-direct and then get out my credit card to pay for it. It just doesn’t seem to fit my work flow.

The speed is perfectly good, I don’t know what I’m getting here but its probabbly around 1 meg and I’m browsing and watching the odd qik video without even thinking about it. I’m not gonna download a whole software update via this but that can easily wait till I get home. I’ve certainly never thought that a hotspot had amazing performance.
The cloud wifi have got a nice setup where the account is tied to the hardware mac address of a device and therefore it connects seamlessly, this works great for my iPhone on rail stations but I think when we see the 3G iPhone its usefulness will diminish, again the hotspots aint everywhere.
Now the only problem is I’m out of coffee and don’t want to pack-up my laptop to go downstairs to order another one, anyone know if the Bath Starbucks is on Twitter? 

I’ve been thinking about my whole web2.0 life for a few weeks now and the multitude of different platforms out there. Some of you know me weel enough to know that I’m not a fan of systems that don’t interoperate! SMS only really took off once you could text across networks and its often one of the biggest barriers to suceess for a service (Yes kids there was a time when you could only send texts to people on the same network - ask your parents!)

Anyway just as we have a very split IM world and people end up with several apps open to stay in touch with people across varios service so the same is happening with Web2.0 sites. Many sites allow you to update your status during the day but I find myself having to post to twitter, facebook my blog and jaiku with basically the same thing.

What I’m thinking of doing is building something to keep all of these in sync, you update one point and it pushes it out to all your services, sortof a GAIM for Web2.0.

The question is how to do this? The obvious way seems to be to use one service as a master and have all the others pushed from there. The obvious one seems to be twitter, its got a multitude of ways to update your ’status’ and seems to be one of the most widespread, also its pretty simple and lightweight so if you don’t have a twitter account signing up for one is no biggie. However twitter has one gap in their API, you can have your status pushed out to a call on another service in some http manner. The only way for twitter to push out to an application is using IM, so I would have to run an IM server to recieve the updates form twitter and post them to the other services. The other method would be to poll the twitter status’s and update accordingly but that doesn’t scale.

Please post your thoughts on this and how you’d use it, also need to find the business model here, bandwidth aint free!

So I’ve heard a lot about twitter and the noise has been rising, Listening to twit on the way to work they were all about it so I decided its time to check it out.

<more>

So What is twitter? Its really hard to say as I don’t think it falls into any obviuos catagory, its a great example of a new format for information thats simple and flexlible that will push tech forward. It depends on what its gonna be used for but its kinda a hybrid of instant messaging, blogging & rss with a community angle on it too. They’ve kept it really simple asnd jsut bulit a communications system then put it out for people to use and develop.

Its got what I think is key to any new web service: API’s without this any app is doomed to fail as in time people will want to use your service their way. Twitter seems to have hit the right spot here. I havn’t delved into the API yet but some of the mashups I’ve seen seem really useful. I’ve got the BBC news and this has been pushing headlines to my phone all day.

What I’ve guessing is the original concept of twitter is cool too, I can add people I enjoy on podcasts to my group and get updates during the day about what they’re doing. It really adds to the sense of personalisation & community in podcsting. It actually seems like I’m getting texts from Leo Laporte and Cali Lewis about how their days going (kinda sad & fan like)

I wonder how long before some mainstream celebrity gets a twitter account and posts updates on their day? Or rather before they have some peon at their record company invents a ficticous life for them, Can just imagine the sort of thing you’d see if I was getting updates on Paris Hiltons day 

So wheres twitter going? Well I don’t think anyone really knows, I’m not quite sure what their business model is. The SMS in the UK come from a longdial number so they sure aint making any money on those and that will cost per message. The site doesn’t seem to have any ads and I dont see a premium option. I guess they could offer a paid service but I’m not sure who to charge. You could limit the number of ‘feed’ a user can subscribe which might work well but I’m sure we’d just start to see a hiarchy of feeds to merge your popular stuff. Charging the popular people would work for the celebrity blog scenario so the more popular you are the more you pay but this might kill the power of blogging in that anybody who makes good points can get big. On the plus side they’ve already got an SMS interface so it should be fairly easy to start billing the users, I’d quite happily pay a couple of dollars a month for this but please dont make the mistake of charging the users to recieve on a per message basis. This really ruins the experience as you feel bad every time to recieve a message so instead of jsut ignoring the uninteresting updates you get annoyed thinking I’ve jsut paid for that!

I’m guessing that the eventual outcome is that someone will buy twitter but who? The easy money would be on google. Twitter is already using jabber so its driving usage of Google Talk, hook it into blogger & google reader and theres some sweet 2.0 synergy (Buzz word alert) I suppose theres the chance that one of the telco’s might pick it up as theres a nice new SMS/IM convergance use case there (more buzz words) but I doubt it will be out there long enogh for any of the mobile operators to notice. If it really kicks off I guess they’ll build their own closed watered down services in good time:-)

Still I’m gonna start twittering and use it while its good but somethings gotta change one day its too good to last