Tuesday, March 11, 2003

WiFi Hard Drive The Martian NetDrive Wireless: 40 gigabytes of small, silent, 802.11b filesharing [via 80211b News]   Excellent idea! 10:02:29 PM    comment []

Sun to sell Kitchen Sinks Sun to simplify its software Web services will be built into Orion - CNET News.com [via Loosely Coupled news aggregator] Is that a Kitchen Sink there with that SPARC machine? 9:57:19 PM    comment []

Enough! Web Services Specs SOAP author says enough specs already "A terrible, terrible thing has happened" - InfoWorld [via Loosely Coupled news aggregator] Amen.  My experience over the past year has shown that pragmatic developers don't really care about all the "missing pieces" in the standards equation and are happily building away with SOAP and WSDL (and almost never with UDDI, let alone other future standards). 9:55:30 PM    comment []

Web Services Management and Intelligence OASIS expands scope of web services management work Acknowledges crucial role of management - Network World [via Loosely Coupled news aggregator]   It's good to see typically slow-moving standards bodies start to look at next-layer services needed for web services deployment: management.   "Management and security are two high-profile issues inhibiting the nirvana of Web services, which promise to integrate systems across corporate boundaries." While it's true that lack of management or integration into generalized management systems is an inhibitor, I think the industry is still too narrowly focused in their definition of 'web services management'.    Recently, I've been talking with a startup focused on this space -- Service Integrity -- and one of the very interesting conclusions they've reached is that the open, transparent nature of XML over the wire really opens up monitoring and instrumentation of software applications in ways that were never possible, or were too intrusive in the past.  Think of it as the intersection of business intelligence and software monitoring.  9:52:37 PM    comment []

Mobile Phones as Audio Devices mmO2 To Start Music-Over-Mobile Pilot: British mobile operator mmO2 announced that it is to trial the world's first 'music over mobile' service using existing mobile... [via PAID: the economics of content]   There's an emerging trend in the mobile space that attempts to combine the mobile phone as simple online services UI + data connectivity with adjacent add-on or even built-in devices that support MP3 Player style music playback.  I'm skeptical that the mobile phone can quickly become a substitute good for portable music devices, especially since the broadband-connected home PC is much better suited to file/library mangement, device synchronization, and existing playback.   That's not to even talk about the difference in bandwidth/quality between GPRS/2.5G and landline broadband. 5:27:08 PM    comment []

A Proxy War for WiFi Dominance Are Hotspots Cooling Down? [via 802.11 Planet]   "With Sprint a heavy investor in Boingo, T-Mobile operating a network of hotspots, and AT&T's involvement in Cometa, are we beginning to see the first shots in a proxy war between cellular giants with Wi-Fi the battleground? You can "view it as a proxy war or a series of civil wars," says Yankee Group analyst Adam Zawel. At the 802.11 Planet Conference & Expo in 2002, Zawel said "there's probably room only for a handful" of survivors." Seems that these investments/alignments of cellular giants with WiFi networks are the first shots of what will be a 3-5 year battle that ultimately margers mobile phone service and WiFi service offerings. 1:27:47 PM    comment []

Toshiba vs. Cometa for WiFi Uber Operator Toshiba Ships Hotspot Hardware [via 802.11 Planet]   News item about Toshiba getting ready to ship their "hotspot in a box" offering.  Great quote from their general manager:   "Think of us as being like Cometa," says Marston, "but cheaper and with a six month lead on them."   Could be that this kind of agile product marketing and distribution could work.  Highlights: $200 wholesale for integrated box Works with DSL and dynamic IPs Fully integrated with Toshiba NOC for management/adming/billing Accenture is building and servicing the NOC center Part of iPass WiFi roaming network What they need are some large integrators, operators and resellers to land them in some significant retail locations/channels to get the kind of critical mass they claim they will have (10,000 hotspots by years end). 1:24:56 PM    comment []

First Cometa WiFi Deployment McDonald's offers meat, potato, Wi-Fi: Cometa's first partner appears to be McDonald's, which will test hot spot service starting with 10 locations in Manhattan, and then expanding to 300 stores in three cities. This is a test, only a test, they note. The service will be free for an hour if an extra value meal is purchased, then $3 per hour. [via 80211b News]   Not what I would have expected to be Cometa's first WiFi deployment --- I don't imagine a lot of laptop and PDA users hanging out at micky-Ds for connectivity, but it's good to see something coming from this mega project. 11:02:00 AM    comment []

Can Flash save cross-platform desktop software? Windows and Mac go their separate ways? This exchange on Dan Gillmor's blog (via Scripting News) about why great tools like Oddpost don't have Mac versions, got me thinking. It cuts both ways. My primary machine right now runs Windows, which means I can't use great software like NoteTaker, NetNewsWire, and EtherPEG. The Windows-only tools I like often aren't really about Windows. They are tied to Microsoft's Internet Explorer engine or Outlook's email client, neither of which I want to use. Anyway, with Apple's resurgence, it seems the two platforms are diverging more rather than less. All of which makes my decision about what machine to buy next more difficult. I know it's either a 12 inch Powerbook or an IBM Thinkpad T series. [via Werblog]   I read Dan Gillmor and Kevin's comments with interest.  It's just these kinds of end-user, Internet-connected applications like Oddpost and NetNewsWire for which Flash is a potentially great runtime.  As Flash plays a larger role on the desktop both inside and outside the browser, and continues to provide a consistent runtime on Mac, Windows, Linux and devices, I expect we'll see more and more boutique ISVs targetting it's very rich runtime. 7:31:50 AM    comment []

Korea Dominating Internet Usage? The Net's Tectonic Shift On Alexa's list of the Top 500 Sites on the Web, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google are in the top 5. That's not surprising. But sites #3 and #4 are, at least to me. They are two South Korean portals. In all, 11 of the top 20 sites on the Alexa list are Asian, dominated by Korea. I knew Korea had the world's highest penetration rates for broadband and mobile phones, but hadn't realized how much usage patterns have shifted as a result. After all, this is a country with less than one-fifth the population of the US. Something major is happening when the usage disparity is that great. [via Werblog] This really caught my attention.  It makes sense in the context of known usage patterns associated with broadband.  Research shows that broadband consumers use the Internet much more frequently and for longer durations.  I've also read that something like 50% of website usage is driven by broadband users, despite only 20% having it in the US.  With Korean broadband usage so high, it makes sense.  But like Kevin, I would have never guessed that it would skew this much. 7:28:54 AM    comment []