Monday, December 9, 2002

In Japan, Cell Phone-Cameras Click with the Public "Mobile phones with built-in digital cameras are taking Japan by storm and, amid a proliferation of new uses, bolstering Japan's reputation as the most advanced and creative cell-phone market in the world. It is a phenomenon likely to be repeated in the United States, where picture phones are just starting to appear in advertisements.... Finding new uses for the pictures has become something of a treasure hunt here. Buyers at Tokyo's world famous Tsukiji fish market's auction beam shots of $15,000 frozen tuna to sushi chefs across Japan before placing their bids. The Osaka police now get dozens of cell-phone photos a month from concerned citizens of crime scenes, stolen cars and suspects. And video microscope firm Scalar Corp. offers free attachments so customers can send skin and scalp photographs to beauty centers for an automated analysis. Perhaps inevitably, the new technology has been tapped for matters of the heart. People are using the pictures as digital alibis, sending previously taken shots of themselves at work to a husband or wife back home, when in reality they're off having an affair. 'One problem is making sure you're wearing the same clothes when you get home that you wore in the picture,' says Atsushi Baba, a systems engineer. Matchmakers have embraced the technology as 'ingles wanted' Web sites proliferate, allowing people to study cell-phone photos online before deciding to take the next step. Magazine articles help the self-conscious with tips on how to look your best in a thumbnail frame.... Men and women tend to use phone-equipped cameras differently, some say. Men take more shots of scenery, their cars, their girlfriends, with a particular emphasis on external objects, says Naoki Nakayama, editor of "J-Phone Sha-mail Hearts" magazine. Women, meanwhile, tend to take more pictures of themselves, their hairstyles, how they look in new clothes, with emphasis on the internal and the psychological, he adds." [LA Times, via Smart Mobs] [The Shifted Librarian] 12:06:14 PM

"The Last Mile" Developing Standards for the Deployment of Optical-Fiber Cable in Underground Utility Systems by Jey K. Jeyapalan, Standardization News, August 2002 Your city office building may be only one kilometre or a mere 10 metres from the nearest end of laid optical-fiber cable, but it might as well be one thousand kilometres. The prospect of upheaval caused by the street excavations required to complete the optical-fiber circuit is too great for most city officials to tolerate. So in many municipalities, what[base ']s known in the industry as [base "]the last mile[per thou] remains unbridged. The innovative process of either robotically laying optical-fiber cable in existing underground utility pipes or including it as part of the relining of these pipes offers a way to complete the circuit without destroying city streets. But standards are essential to assure telecom and utility companies that public safety will be preserved, and that[base ']s where a new ASTM technical committee comes in[~]as a place where telecom companies and others will pull together their expertise to serve the optical fiber in underground utilities industry. BoingBoing has a picture A new standards-setting committee has formed to create best-practices for sewer-bots, semi-autonomous robot subterranean conduit-zippers that pull high-speed data lines around. 6:08:56 AM

from 80211b News, 12/9/02; 5:00:32 AM. Cometa equals rural electrification? From what I can tell from reading coverage of Cometa's plans -- the partnership of AT&T, IBM, and Intel to build Wi-Fi infrastructure -- they're really not rolling out 50,000 hot spots in 50 metro areas. If you read closely what they've announced, they're just opening for business, hoping that real-estate venues will pay them to build infrastructure for them. It could work: Fortune 5000 firms are unlikely to pick small players to partner with. Airports that have been on the fence might more likely pay millions to Cometa than to a firm only in business a year or two with a few million in billings. The coverage of Cometa has been like the invention of electricity, while I would liken it more to rural electrification. It's not sexy, it might not even be needed, but it'll take a lot of money -- and not money from the users, but from the folks who want to charge people for the juice. [80211b News] Cold, hard hot spot dollars and sense from the New York Times: A veteran business reporter casts a cold eye -- although one in concert with most analysts and observers -- on the current potential of Wi-Fi hot spots to make money. It's clear to me that we're entirely in an experimental stage, and anyone with a business plan to turn a profit within two years on their whole network, not just locations within, should be looked at carefully. [80211b News] Aggregating heterogenous WLANs: It's not a sexy topic for those of you outside the enterprise, but I've learned quite a bit in the last week about the status of managing large numbers of WLAN access points that aren't made by the same company (i.e,. Cisco or Proxim). More details as time allows, but the bottom line is that WLAN managers don't have to buy $500 to $1000 access points and suffer equipment lock-in to get the benefit of mass aggregated AP management. [80211b News] from InfoWorld: Handling mobile apps. ISVs manufacture handheld apps despite development challenges [InfoWorld: Top News] 5:49:58 AM

NY Times: A New Tack in Fighting Spam. These "bonded" messaging services are creating the equivalent of certified, or first class, e-mail. If they catch on -- and that is a notion that some Internet analysts doubt -- they could signal a fundamental shift away from the proposition that it is free to send mail over the Internet. [Tomalak's Realm] 5:24:03 AM

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