Monday, September 29, 2003

John Patrick: "Just like the Internet and the Web in the mid 1990's, VoIP is spreading rapidly. It is happening from the bottom up. It is not being throttled by any centralized bureaucracy or oligopoly. The gaps in services and reliability will be filled in through active global competition with funding from venture capitalists. The momentum is beginning to build." [via lawrence's notebook] 7:48:42 PM    comment []  trackback []

Dynamic event files Alf is doing some pretty neat stuff with iCalendar files through URLs. "To dynamically generate an ics file for an event, you can point to event.openam.com You need to pass the following variables: format (only ics at the moment) timezone (eg Europe/London) start_date as yyyymmdd start_time as hhmm stop_date as yyyymmdd stop_time as hhmm summary An example: http://event.openam.com?format=ics&;timezone=Europe/Paris&start_date=20030929&start_time=2215&stop_date=20030929&stop_time=2340&summary=Dix-sept%20ans%20(2003)%20(Arte) Note: The summary won't work with Unicode characters, as I can't get the conversion to work at the moment."  [via hublog] Alf.. yes, .ics files do open natively in Outlook (at least Outlook XP).  However, they don't like to have the timezone included.  When Outlook generates an iCalendar formatted file, it converts the time to GMT. Additionally, as all Microsoft products have quirks, the file format is only recognized when the last 4 characters are ".ics" I'm wondering if we rearranged the variables in the querystring we could get something like: http://event.openam.com?start_date=20030929&;start_time=2215&stop_date=20030929&stop_time=2340&summary=Dix-sept%20ans%20(2003)%20(Arte)&format=.ics Thoughts? (let me know if that trackback worked too) 6:47:12 PM    comment []  trackback []

Wi-Fi Competition?. "Verizon Wireless launched a new data service in Washington, D.C. and San Diego: Starting Oct. 1, customers can pay $79.99 a month for a 300-500 Kbps connection. Customers must use a PC card that costs $179 after a $100 rebate. This meets the 3G (third generation) test for speed. It will be interesting to see how these services compete with Wi-Fi. Obviously this cellular offering is much more expensive than an unlimited monthly Wi-Fi subscription with several carriers and offers a fraction of the typical 1.5 Mbps back-haul speed. But Verizon would likely argue that it will be available in more places. Plus, prices will likely go down. We'll also have to see just how fast these services really are. The cellular industry is notorious for overstating data rates. But this particular service has usually been marketed to deliver 2 Mbps, so Verizon may be trying to better manage expectations by touting it as a 300-500 Mbps service...." [Wi-Fi Networking News] 5:04:14 PM    comment []  trackback []