Friday, October 24, 2003|
Managing Over the Airwaves. Setting up a wireless LAN opens up a new set of network management challenges. Fortunately, as the popularity of such networks has grown, so have the options available to monitor and manage them. The trick is choosing the right software for the job you need to do. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] 5:32:42 PM  comment
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iAnywhere upgrades sales app, offers Wi-Fi development kit. Enhancements intended to encourage sales workers in the field to make more use of an organization's CRM software. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] 5:32:26 PM comment
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NEC shows Wi-Fi connectivity at high speed. Successful service handovers in car traveling at bullet-train speed. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] 5:32:04 PM comment
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Motorola goes small with mobile architecture. Company says devices such as MP3 players, DVD players and digital cameras could be equipped with communications capabilities. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] 5:31:31 PM comment
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GM CTO sees auto industry embracing RFID by 2008. GM CTO Anthony Scott said he expects the auto industry to use RFID technology throughout its supply chain within three to five years, and he predicted Wi-Fi in cars during the same time frame. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] 5:31:10 PM comment
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GUIs, linking, and interface experimentation. In one crucial way, the rich GUI is tragically disadvantaged with respect to its poor browser cousin. Trying to sort out a permissions problem with IIS 6, I clicked a Help button and landed on a Web page. The page could only describe the tree-navigation procedure required to find the tabbed dialog box where I could address the problem. It could not link to that dialog box. This is nuts when you stop and think about it. Documentation of GUI software needs pages of screenshots and text to describe procedures that, on the Web, are encapsulated in links that can be published, bookmarked, and e-mailed. A GUI that doesn't embrace linking can never be truly rich. [InfoWorld: How rich is the rich GUI?: October 17, 2003]Everybody agreed with the central theme of this column: the "rich" GUI ought to embrace linking. The secondary theme -- that the "rich" GUI ought to be richer on its own terms -- provoked a variety of responses. Danny Ayers worked up an interesting CSS/JavaScript variant of Samuel Wan's fisheye demo. Hamish Harvey's response: ... [Jon's Radio] 5:30:51 PM comment
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Our own devices. 
Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, has a new book called Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology. Meticulously researched chapters trace the historical development of footgear, chairs, keyboards, and eyeglasses. The unifying theme is the coevolution of technology and technique: how we both change and are changed by these "body technologies" as we use them.
... [Jon's Radio]5:30:27 PM comment
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Ben Bederman's DateLens. 
Responding to this week's column, Glen Vanderburg notes correctly that I should have credited Ben Bederson's pioneering work on fisheye distortion in GUIs. I checked, and Samuel Wan does cite Bederson on his blog. Glenn writes:
Ben has been working for over ten years now to increase the richness of our GUIs through the use of scale -- in some cases zooming, and in other cases fisheye distortion. Check out the DateLens link on his page, and *be* *sure* to watch the demo video.DateLens It's a whopping 45MB MPEG file, but I did watch it. To come full circle, you can also see a Flash demo of DateLens in action here. Or, as it turns out, you can actually use a free desktop version of DateLens -- there's an add-in (written C# for the 1.1 .NET Framework) available here. I'm trying it out today. It's full of powerful ideas! I love how the grid grows and shrinks to accommodate arbitrary amounts of content, how search results are mapped onto the scroll bar, and how exactly-like and similar items are color-coded with a single click. ... [Jon's Radio] 5:29:51 PM comment
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Clash of the titans: Amazon vs. Google. 
Ned Batchelder alerted me this morning to Amazon's new search feature:
Now Amazon lets you search the full text of its books. This is astounding, not only because of the further differences it highlights between Amazon and traditional bookstores, but because of the effort it must have taken to accomplish. The text seems to be from scans of pages, subjected to an OCR process. And not just the bulk of popular books, either. They've got all sorts of wild and wooly volumes available this way. I don't know how truly useful it will be, since full text searching can be extremely noisy, even before the OCR noise is factored in. [Ned Batchelder: October 2003]I wondered about the OCR strategy too. In this day and age, surely any publisher could provide electronic copy to an indexer. But then I drilled down and discovered something quite remarkable. I own a copy of Tesla: Man Out of Time. The other day, I was mentioning to someone that, according to that book, some of Nikola Tesla's writings are still classified. This query finds the passage I was remembering. Awesome! Now the physical book I bought from Amazon is more valuable to me. Its printed index has been augmented by a vastly more capable online index. This extremely useful capability is, by the way, also available to owners of books in the Safari Books Online service, though it correlates results only to chapter and section, not to page. Little-known fact: you need not be a Safari subscriber to use Safari as an augmented index to books you own. ... [Jon's Radio] 5:28:41 PM comment
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Study finds that bad cell reception mainly due to networks, not phones. Surprise, surprise! A new study by a British firm called Psytechnics discovered that buying a more expensive cellphone doesn't guarantee better cellular reception, and that the biggest factor in whether or not you'll get decent service is the quality of the network. Cellphone companies' response: things will get better once we all move to 3G. We totally believe that. Read [Via TechDirt]... [Gizmodo] 5:28:05 PM comment
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Mobile syndication. One of the cool things I'm doing with my new Treo is reading RSS feeds from blogs and other news sites, using a Palm app called Hand/RSS. News aggregators make even more sense in a mobile context than on a PC, because browsing the Web is much harder on a handheld, low-bandwidth device. [Werblog] 5:27:31 PM comment
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So how do they make up the difference?. The Register: "According to a Yankee Group survey of 25 incumbent and alternate operators across 16 European countries, two thirds of operators expect traditional voice services to account for less than 50 per cent of their revenue by 2006." [Werblog] 5:26:21 PM comment
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The Guardian: Second sight. Moreover, the sense of human agency implied in the term "user" has been forgotten. Usability is a valuable element of the process, but it can't substitute for it, as it is limited. Usability can be used to improve an innovation, but it can't drive innovation. [Tomalak's Realm] 5:24:43 PM comment
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Old new thinking in Telecom. According to BusinessWeek, Microsoft has a brilliant solution for the telecom industry's woes: instead of selling dumb connectivity, sell value-added services. I have a little secret for you. Every carrier has been saying this for at least twenty years. No one, with the possible exception of Level 3, wants to be a "dumb pipe." Yet the only "services" that have taken off so far are ringtones, SMS messaging in Europe, and wireless data apps in Japan. The problem isn't the lack of standards, which is what the BusinessWeek article seems to suggest. It's a conflict between edge and center. My new Treo has lots of great services like Vindigo that I willingly pay for. I spent $400 on the device itself, and more on an expansion memory card to play MP3s. The problem is that hardly any of that money goes to Sprint, the telecom operator. And with voice over IP, WiFi, and the inevitable unbundling of phones and wireless networks, Sprint will get squeezed even more. The money today is in the apps on the edge, hardware, and of all things, dumb connectivity. The first one explains Microsoft's presence at the Telecom Show, the second one explains the large Intel and HP booths, and the last one is what carriers don't want to hear. If you talk to US mobile phone subscribers, though, I bet you'll hear far more complaints about coverage and network speed than lack of services or high prices. The first user-facing telecom company to execute the Dell/Wal-Mart model -- being the efficient commodity provider -- will make a killing. (Partly because they will kill their competitors.) Not that this is an easy task. Legacy billing systems and legacy culture are huge hurdles to overcome. The "services" alternative, though, is a mirage. The few exceptions like NTT DoCoMo only prove the rule. [Werblog] 5:24:18 PM comment
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Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia. An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. [Tomalak's Realm] 5:23:49 PM comment
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Sony and NTT DoCoMo working on pay-by-cellphone system. You may recall our post from a couple of weeks ago about that pay-by-cellphone system which has been set up in South Korea. Well, now Sony and NTT DoCoMo are working on putting special microchips into DoCoMo's FOMA handsets so subscribers can pay for stuff at stores just by swiping their phones near a card reader. Read... [Gizmodo] 5:23:17 PM comment
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Scientific computing: Apple's next big leap? [IDG InfoWorld] 5:22:13 PM comment
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Jon Udell: Apple's Knowledge Navigator revisited. During my session at BloggerCon I referred to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video. I first saw that video in 1988. Today I tracked down a copy and watched it again. It stands the test of time rather well! Certain elements of that vision are now routine... [Tomalak's Realm] 5:21:56 PM comment
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Mobile cellular data powers the interactive taxi -- and the repo man. Global Vision Interactive uses Sprint PCS to deliver news, information and ads to taxis, while Camping Companies uses the same high-speed network for its auto repossession business. [Computerworld News] 5:21:09 PM comment
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Defense Department drafts RFID policy. The U.S. Department of Defense is requiring all its suppliers to use radio frequency identification chips, giving the controversial technology a boost. [CNET News.com - Front Door] 5:16:02 PM comment
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© Copyright
2005
Omar Javaid
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Last update: 7/15/05; 8:00:11 PM .
Last update: 7/15/05; 8:00:11 PM .
