Wednesday, December 11, 2002

... the crowds who surround us every day constitute a huge waste of social capital. If you live in a city for instance, there are many who pass within a few yards of you each day who could give you a ride home, buy an item you're trying to sell, or consider you as dating material. Dynamic networking makes it possible to tap those resources through a momentary alliance among transient interest groups, "like people working in a given neighborhood, staying overnight in a certain district, or taking the 10:15 flight to Chicago," Kortuem explains. In a world of wireless wearables, computers embedded in clothing could form networks on the fly, prompting software agents to carry out mutually beneficial transactions. A group waiting to buy movie tickets might use an ad hoc network to auction off favorable places in line. Thousands of people in Times Square could pool computing power and sell it by the teraflop-second to nearby office buildings. [Smart Mobs] 2:58:29 PM

When you call someone on their T-Mobile phone, and it rings through to their voice mail, and you choose the option to send them a phone number, it knows what phone number you're calling from and offers to send that number to them by pressing "1".  Sweet! 2:56:46 PM

Wi-Fi year in review: The Seattle Times runs through the major Wi-Fi stories of 2002 in a concise and interesting fashion, hitting the high points and telling the business story behind them. [80211b News] This time last year, I was doing wireless stuff, but it was all either WAP/WML, J2ME, or PalmOS-based, and over mobile phone networks.  Wireless LAN technology was just something I a couple of my friends had set up in their houses. Much has changed in one year.  This summer, I got the 802.11 fever.  Ever since I started paying attention, it seems that everyone has started working on this stuff.  I suppose that's the nature of perception.  Still, it is good. 11:06:20 AM

"I think we're all way too worried how each of us looks, and not enough worried about where we're going. I think this has always been true, ever since Visicalc, but we had enough momentum to hide our vanity and make it seem as if all the bluster somehow mattered. Perhaps this conference will be the turning of the tide, perhaps a real conversation will happen, not in the hallways, but in the conference room. Perhaps we'll leave with ideas for our software, not fear from having our ideas taken and implemented by other people who are more popular, or richer, or whatever." [Scripting News] 11:04:55 AM