15 January 2003

Possible support for those considering living in London Looking for a house in London? Planning a journey? Want to check out the area you might move into? Where are the schools? What's the pollution like? Need a good mortgage, surveyor or solicitor? ... Well here are some websites to try out. 6:30:19 PM     comments

Steven Johnson on games: Sims online and Adults Why grown-ups shouldn't spend money on video games: "For a grown-up gamer, the Hitman 2 download was the perfect size: just enough game-play to get a taste of the action but not enough to alienate the boss or the wife. And right now, you can't beat the price [free!]" Even without wizards, the Sims Online is a fantasy: despite seeming more realistic (ie no elves) than other massively multi-players systems, Sims Online has a distorted reality of its own: no menace. 4:54:22 PM     comments

Phones lose millions of text messages Keynote Systems Inc. says in its study (26,000 messages sent in US over two weeks) that 7.5 percent of all short text messages sent between wireless telephone companies are lost 4:53:57 PM     comments

Mobiles and personal safety/privacy Poor phone UI considered harmful to those in snow Gym bans camera phones in locker-rooms 4:51:44 PM     comments

Why voice-dial from the network rather than your mobile James Colby of Comverse Voice Solutions tells us why server-side voice-dialling is more effective in the network than embedded in your phone (quoted directly from the article): There are several advantages network-based voice dialing has over voice dialing in the handset. First, network-based voice dialing addresses all users now and does not require subscribers to upgrade to a new phone. Second, voice dialing in the network (and its associated technologies) can be readily extended to other new features such as multiparty calling, voice information services and content, and voice-controlled messaging. Third, the speech recognition engine can be evolved and/or upgraded to enable new capabilities and features to be added to the recognizer. In addition, in an open VoiceXML system, the speech recognition engine can perform double duty by supporting not only VAD, but other VoiceXML applications as well, which means that component costs can be leveraged over multiple applications, minimizing costs. Fourth, the address book is kept in the network so contact information is not lost should the telephone be replaced, stolen or misplaced or should the telephone malfunction. In addition, management of the address book is significantly easier with Web-based control of a network-based application. To populate the address book, a subscriber can voice enroll new entries or they can go to a Website offered by the carrier. In most instances, subscribers can download contact information directly from Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes, making easy work of managing their address book. Last, the address book can be expanded to include a corporate address book and a system address book. The corporate address book is synchronized with databases managed by the enterprise, so that calling a colleague becomes nearly effortless because all you have to do is say their name into the phone. The system address book is managed by the carrier and includes entries of commonly requested premium access numbers like restaurants, retail outlets, theaters, hotels and more. These frequently used service numbers represent an additional premium revenue source for service providers. Overall, carriers should realize decreased churn because once a subscriber has spent the time to provision the address book, they are more reluctant to switch providers. The challenge is whether consumers know about these benefits, and whether they believe that they are worth $4/month. We think that voice-dialling-from-the-handset is now seen as a given, at zero cost to the consumer (certainly in Europe anyway). 11:57:28 AM     comments