19 August 2002

AvantGo Paid Space AvantGo.com -- You can get 8MB of channel info by sbscribing to a $19.95 AvantGo plan. The 2MB option remains free.

What if Vodafone's e-merge Closes? ENN.ie -- Vivendi may sell its 50 percent share in Vizzavi to Vodafone for EUR 150m, bringing the future of the Ireland's e-merge wireless portal into question. The sale would form part of Vivendi's drive to offload more than EUR 10b in assets over the next two years, in order to reduce debt. Vodafone and Vivendi have invested more than EUR 1b in the portal, which aimed to bring multimedia content such as music and video to the users to high-end mobile phones.

Paid Listings Must Be Separated Stefanie Olsen on CNET -- Major Web portals are starting to separate paid listings from the nonpaid stuff

Notebook Overhaul on the Horizon CNET -- I count on my notebook to be my desktop and my entertainment co-ordinator. So it's nice to know that others are also demanding innovation from notebook manufactures. For me, it means getting more performance, better battery life, BIOS-level WiFi, and fast power-off. In 2002, I've moved into multiband wireless communications, where my notebooks drifts from GSM to WiFi to dial-up and back, all without restarting.

Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote Lawrence Lessig -- In his address before a packed house at the Open Source Convention, Lawrence Lessig challenged the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Lawrence, a tireless advocate for open source, is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of the best-selling book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. You can get the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002. You can also download a 20MB MP3 version of the presentation.

Giving Up Privacy and Trusting Digital Angels Applied Digital Solutions -- When looking at the innocent faces of the two 10-yr girls who were abducted and killed in England last week, I started to think that I will compromise the privacy of children in exchange for them wearing the new generation of tracking devices. The devices combine two existing technologies. One is a global-positioning-system (GPS) chip, which uses radio signals from a network of satellites to work out where it is on the earth's surface to within a few metres. The other is a mobile-telephone chip, which broadcasts that location to whoever needs to know it. The result is a pocket-sized, or even wrist-sized, personal locator. Applied Digital Solutions calls its version of the technology a “digital angel”. The angel comes in two versions. People get a pager-like device that clips on to their clothing. Animals get a collar. The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous. The wearer's guardians define a perimeter beyond which they feel their charge should not wander, and receive alerts via mobile phone when he has gone beyond these boundaries. >>This is non-intrusive gerontechnology. The digital angel can also issue an alert when its wearer has fallen down, or when there has been an unexpected change in local temperature of the sort that might be caused, say, by someone falling into a pond. For that to happen, the wearer needs to sport a specially modified wristwatch which has suitable sensors and a wireless link to the pager.

Ray Ozzie Recommends Canon Power Shot OZZIE.net -- Ray Ozzie loves his Canon PowerShot S40. "Absolutely a wonderful camera, in so many dimensions, and I've used it quite a bit. Bought one for my son, who took it to college and shared all sorts of great photos over the year via Groove." Now he's looking for a camera that "passes the cell phone threshold for me - meaning, small enough that I would carry it continuously, that I'd never have to think about battery life, and that if even if I didn't take many pictures, I'd have had few regrets in carrying it."

Plugging Intranet Pigeonholes with Klogs STEPTWO.com.au -- Why not use klogs to enhance intranets? Klogging could enhance both intranet information and content management. If you want a logical hierarchical structure, then organic growth is a problem. It's like running water, it flows down along the path of least resistance and doesn't care about the direction. Same with people, they'll squirrel stuff anywhere that makes sense today (have you taken a good look at your my "My Documents" directory lately?) Of course if you're klogging then this organic growth is part of the package. Klogging helps intranet information exchange. When you have something to publish it's dead easy: click, type, click. You can publish in bite-size chunks. This means that if you have a small but useful piece of information you can just klog it. You don't have to pad it into a long document to make it worthwhile. You also don't have to find "just the right place" for it to go, it just gets klogged. That chunk can exist in it's own right, waiting for the day someone needs it. As it stands klogging is a decentralizing technology that doesn't encourage a formal hierarchical structure. You klog and, if all goes according to plan, people will subscribe to you and they will link to you. Some people might argue that a healthy klogging culture coupled with a Google search appliance. Perhaps you shouldn't scrap the intranet and replace it with klogs, but you should think carefully about what you want your intranet to achieve and whether some of your goals for information publishing and dissemination couldn't be better achieved with a klogging strategy.

Sighting: CDFax for Sending CD-ROMs Over IP CDFax is a command-line Linux utility for "fax-like transfer of CDs." Two people run the software. The receiver loads a CD blank in his burner, and the sender puts a CD to be sent in her drive. The sender enters a brief command that specifies the receiver's IP address and the disk is imaged, sent, and burned at the remote end. A simple and striking idea. [BoingBoing] [Beltorchicca]

Let Users Control Font Size KILKENNY, Ireland -- We're lucky to have expert usability consultancy on demand from people who need help seeing Web pages. So after a casual afternoon coffee with our Web developers, we're going to scrub all our stylesheets that restrict font sizes. That would please Jakob Neilsen, who argues we should let users control font size. It actually hurts sight-impaired viewers when Web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel.

Warstorming Over Perth Perth, Australia -- While airborne, they spotted 90 networks. Jason Jordan noted, "We're the first to brag about going War Storming, . . . a combination of war driving and barn storming.