Social Networking 2.0

Despite some stupid and controversial moves, (like the recent one by Facebook to change the Terms of Use stripping users of the rights to their content), Internet - powered social networking keeps on gaining in popularity. We suddenly find we live in communities. Communities that even cross each other and are totally location - independent. Yes, there still is a barrier of timezone, or - more important - culture, but it would be nearly impossible to find a person these days, who does not have friends abroad.

The other day I had an idea of a device / service (I even wanted to patent it). A box sitting between the Net and a TV (like Apple TV) with an interface to a webcam. The idea behind was to achieve social watching experience, but with an ordinary TV and voice / interactive video overlay, instead of PC and "just" texting. I even envisioned an Apple TV box where you could just plug in any USB webcam, and some software to overlay a strip of your buddies' faces on top of the broadcast stream. Then I started digging for existing patents on that and found a number of them. A few examples:

• USPAT6590602. Digital television system overlays subscriber two-way communication during broadcast program delivery to create virtual audience community. Individual or group billing and advertisement is personalized per DTV receiver program viewing and/or conferencing activity. Subscriber receiver includes camera and other media I/O device for multi-way video conferencing. Participants may be added or removed dynamically during programming or conferencing.
• USPAT6243129. A videoconferencing arrangement that selectively creates a composite arrangement of videoconferencing data along with video data from a supplemental video source. In one embodiment, a first analog-to-digital converter provides digital videoconferencing data from a camera source, and a second analog-to-digital converter is arranged to provide digital video data from a supplemental analog video signal source, such as a broadcast television signal. Digital video signals from a remote videoconferencing arrangement are decompressed and provided as input, along with the video data from the camera and supplemental video data, to a video processor. Responsive to selection signals, the video processor scales selected video data and overlays the scaled video data on selected other video data. For example, a live television broadcast can be overlaid with remote videoconferencing data.

So my idea was not that novel... or may be I was simply late... But despite these patents being already five or ten years old, such social watching scenarios are not popular yet. But this is going to change, soon I believe. And Facebook has a good chance to be in the center of it all. Sling, the maker of the famous SlingBox video relay device has recently introduced an integration with Facebook. At the Mobile World Congress the Global Mobile Award for the best mobile handset went to INQ who bypassed all the Nokias and Androids (not to mention the absent iPhones) with the INQ1. And Facebook is the central application the INQ1 thrives on.

Social networking is breaking free from our computers and coming down to phones and TVs. And other devices. Think fridges and on line grocery shopping. Should not fridges from your neighborhood get together, compile list of products for tonight's party and negotiate better volume discounts while allowing the friends to agree on the menu?

Wireless Data Desert

So we all have wireless wide area connectivity, right? Well... most of the time this is true. At least when we do not leave the home country. Going abroad is (still) a different story. "G" in GSM stands for "Global". The idea behind was to have a phone that works in every country. And more or less this vision has been fulfilled, when it comes to voice calls. SMS messages are not too far behind, but I do remember just a few years ago going to the US would result in very unreliable SMS service. I was always supposed to send an SMS home when landed. Unfortunately they were not always delivered on time. I mean - today it is probably not an issue, since service providers have polished their roaming agreements and network interconnects, so they really work. But in 2005 I happened to send a couple of SMS messages and they were delivered some three weeks later. Of course SMS is a store - and - forward messaging, so likely messages are stroed somewhere in transit and once in a while when a forwarding thread on SMSC stops polling the queue and is later restarted by a system administrator, it finally delivers. SMSes have also this nice feature of delivery reports (something iPhones do not support), so you may be notified of successful delivery.

Unfortunately it is all still very different when it comes to mobile data roaming. First, you may just use your primary mobile data device (a phone or a modem) with your default SIM card in it. The easiest way to go. You land in a foreign city and likely your device will connect to your home network's APN. From my experience chances are 60% or higher. So there still is the 40% (guesstimate) failure rate. For various reasons foreign GPRS systems may not be willing to accept your attempt of creating a data session. It is not even clearly indicated, just when you try a data application (email or Web browser) you will fail to connect. Very often it helps to manually select the service provider. Should T-Mobile not work, select Vodafone or Orange or something else... chances are you will finally get through. Lucky! Really? The reality check comes when you get a bill. What is usually charged at flat monthly rate, suddenly appears extremely expensive. $1,50 for 100kB. Separate charge for uplink and downlink. So the tiniest data session will cost you around $3. Ten email attempts a day? $30. A fortnight holidays? $420... just for email... Did you know that? OK, regulators in the EU are working on it, we can get the prices down now by 75%. But this is still expensive. With average HSDPA you can still be able to transmit Internet packets at a rate of $1 per second...

So is there a workaround? A cure? Definitely not a hotel rate of $20 a night for WiFi. But look what you have at home. $20 usually buys you a monthly access to mobile data network. You can have that on prepaid service too... In Poland PLAY offers 1GB starter for 20PLN which is around $6. Go to the store and get yourself a prepaid data SIM card. Which store you ask? That is the difficult part. Martin Sauter (the author of recently published Beyond 3G - Bringing Networks, Terminals and the Web Together: LTE, WiMAX, IMS, 4G Devices and the Mobile Web 2.0 maintains a very useful database of prepaid data offers here. It is very helpful. Preparing for the trip, I visit Martin's site and print hard copies of how-to's related to mobile data service providers in the country of my destination. Why hard copies? Because you cannot rely on the Internet when you do not have Internet access...:) Sometimes, however, even this plan fails. I have just read the recent blog post by Martin, suggesting things do not necessarily work as advertised. He later reported via Twitter, he finally succeeded connecting. So with some extra effort, there really is a workaround... I am following his directions now in preparation for skiing holidays in Austria. We will not have WiFi in the apartment, so I will be looking for Austrian prepaid data cards. of course a SIM-free modem helps here. And by no means I am going to pay the mobile service providers the crazy premium for roaming data services. I still have my BlackBerry with flat rate global email as a last resort... It is tough to live without connectivity these days...

The Switch: Episode 4

I have been using the BlackBerry Bold for two months now. It has been a battle uphill the learning curve. The basic laws of nature are different in the BlackBerry world. Of course I expected something unexpected entering this land. I expected BlackBerry handsets being fully controlled both by RIM and by the wireless service provider. But what I did not expect was how a service provider can without a reason cut the functionality by half. Or even more. But let me tell the story from the beginning.

BlackBerries have their own very special way of handling data connections. In case of the Bold 9000 there are four scenarios:

• The phone is connected via cellular data channel (GPRS or EDGE or 3/3.5G) to the service provider's generic APN. With this connection you can run some (but relatively few) applications (like the GMail rich client) and one incarnation of Web browser that goes directly to the Internet and renders pages entirely on the device.
• The phone is connected to your local Wi-Fi network. In this cace functionality is even more limited. There are just a few applications capable of working over pure Wi-Fi connection (the GMail client mentioned above does not work over Wi-Fi), the browser is one of them, but in this case it is the Hotspot Browser. Hotspot Browser is more or less the same browser as the one used over GPRS, but you cannot change connection on the fly. On my BlackBerry there are even two separate icons - one launches the GPRS browser and the other launches teh Hotspot browser. Weird... weird... especially after many years with the Windows Mobile platform.
• The phone is connected via cellular data channel (GPRS or EDGE or 3/3.5G) to the [blackberry.net] APN. To be able to do that you need to have BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) provisioned. With BIS you get push email (that used to be the main selling point of BlackBerry), but also when properly provisioned, the browser in the incarnation named [Internet Browser] uses this connection to get to the Internet with the help of RIM servers. Properly provisioned is the key word here, as with my BlackBerry this has not been the case. My service provider, which is T-Mobile Poland, did not provision the service the way it should.
  
• The phone is connected via Wi-Fi that is just a bearer for a VPN tunnel opened by the phone to the RIM servers. From the application standpoint this is almost the same as the previous [blackberry.net] mode, butworks over different radio - Wi-Fi insead of cellular.
  

After reading thousand or so messages on various Internet forums, I learned there were two service books missing on my Berry. Service books is a kind of registry controlled by service providers that specifies what functionality is available on the device and how and you cannot change it on your own. So the two missing in my case were:

• IPPP for BIBS [IPPP] (I assume this opens a pipe to RIM servers)
• BlackBerry Internet Browsing Service [Browser Config] (this one probably turns on the appropriate web browser functionality)

The symptoms of the missing service books were easy to detect.

First, there was no [Internet Browser] on my device. I mean I could browse the Internet with the hotspot browser (over Wi-Fi) or with the generic browser (over generic APN), but in the latter case the device was switching back and forth between the two APNs, and that in turn resulted in poor performance and high data bill, as the sessions with each APN were very short (several kB each) and T-Mobile rounds every session up to the nearest 100kB for billing purposes. I wrote about this in the Episode 3.

Second, many applications did not work at all reporting all sorts of connection problems. To avoid juggling the APNs and to optimize the bill for data services, a lot of applications want to use the [blackberry.net] tunnel to get to the Internet via RIM servers. BlackBerry terminals try to keep the [blackberry.net] APN attached all the time and it is usually good practice to write other applications to piggy back on this very connection. Some applications, like the TwitterBerry Twitter client, let you select (or auto-select) the connection type. But many, like E*Trade Mobile Pro (an excellent stocks / financial application), just do not work at all when BIBS is not provisioned. On top of that many applications stop working when you are out of the network coverage, but within a Wi-Fi range (which is the case where I live). To run the Facebook application, I have to lean out of the window to reach for GPRS signal. With BIBS properly provisioned, Facebook would tunnel via my Wi-Fi and RIM servers to the Net. The same applies to numerous other apps.

When I realized what was going on, I called T-Mobile customer support asking to send me the missing service books. They said they did. Nothing appeared on my side. I asked again. They said they did resend me the service books. And we looped this several times. I was wondering what was going on... Started digging over the BlackBerry Knowledge Base. Found several articles describing my very problem. Sent them the links. Just to get the final reply "we do not provision the service books you are asking for". So I opened an unofficial channel via a good friend of mine and he came back with "Sorry... This is the way it works at T-Mobile... You will not get your BIBS...". What to do? I threw the same question over to the other mobile service providers in Poland - Vodafone and Orange. They both confirmed they do provision BIBS. And I checked their prices... 60% less than T-Mobile... Guess what will happen now? Of course I will terminate my contract with T-Mobile. My BlackBerry is unfortunately SIM-locked, so it will be auctioned on eBay and I will be buying a new one (as I really love the way it works) from a different service provider.

Yeah, I know.... I should have asked before the purchase... "Excuse me, Mr. T-Mobile, I really like this Bold 9000 smartphone, but before I commit to sign a contract... do you provision the IPPP for BIBS service book?"... Somebody somewhere at T-Mobile decided not to provide the RIM BIBS service to the customers. For whatever reason... This move just cut half of the functionality or more... some users may be will not realize... but I am furious... really furious... Look fo the next episodes of The Switch. I have switched to the new mobile platform. I really like it. But to realize its full potential I have to switch the service provider too. Hope the series won't be too long...

Netbook Life

My brand new Lenovo X200s died. The first symptoms of the deadly illness were spotted a month ago. It was 3 weeks old at that time. Horizontal strips across the screen and reset. I sent it for warranty repair, it came back after 15 days not being touched. "Tested" was the service description, I tried to argue with the lady handing it back to me, but finally gave up... And It worked fine for two weeks without a glitch. I was even thinking I had treated the lady at the Lenovo service center too bad, and may be the computer was really "tested" and the previous breakdowns had been just my imagination. But then it crashed for good. My feeling is these days electronics fail much more often than mechanics, so do not immediately trust these ads saying "no moving parts" etc... Do not be surprised when your SSD drive fails while your spindle drives keep on running... Anyway... I was facing another two weeks without the laptop. I tried to rejuvenate my old OQO 01 but that thing was far too slow even for the lightest of today's tasks... It barely keeps up with bare bone Windows XP installation and Google Chrome with just a few tabs. BTW if you have really slow hardware, Chrome is the only way you may want to handle today's Web pages that are full of JavaScript. On such hardware anybody will notice the supremacy of V8-based JScript engine Google opted for.

So when I found out the old OQO was not up to the task of serving as a two - week replacement for the X200s, I dug out an old Pentium-IV based desktop from my basement and went out shopping to find a cheap LCD display. I wanted a simple 1024x768 screen. To my surprise there was just one 1280x1024 17 inch display ($80) in the computer superstore and everything else was at least 1440x900 or more, many with built-in TV tuners. Compare that to the first LCD I bought 9 years ago for $5000... When walking along the shelves I noticed a number of netbooks on display. With price ranges of around $300 the specs really surprised me. Take the Lenovo S10 as an example. 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, beautiful 1024x600 LED-backlit screen, WiFi, EDR Bluetooth, 2xUSB, Express Card, Windows XP Home... all in 2.5 lbs package... Hey... this is not that much different compared to my top-of-the-line X200... HDD is the same, screen a little smaller, less powerful processor (Atom vs Penryn) and price of the S10 is 1/4 or even 1/5 of the X200s... Being able to hold my temptation to grab one, I came back home with the $80 LCD display just to find out I no longer can work with desktop PC... I want my personal screen and keyboard everywhere... on a sofa, on a table, in a bathroom... So this morning I went back to the store to get the S10... Having an inexpensive portable computer is what I really like for various reasons... Especially for vacation travel when it can just get lost or stolen... Or simply as a backup for times like today when my primary workhorse is sent for repair...

So I brought the S10 and I really loved it at first sight. The screen is gorgeous. The setup was simple and the speed of the 1,6GHz Atom chip is impressive. 9 AJAX tabs in Firefox with no signs of slowdown. The only drawback I see is the battery life. You should be able to squeeze 3 hours from the small battery, but that is not a lot, especially comparing to machines like the X200s, that give you almost 10 hours on a single charge. But hey... for that price I would not expect a killer in all categories...

Interesting reflection came after I finished setting up the machine. First it took Windows 2 hours helping itself with the updates. 36 updates weighing 400 Megs... This is a shame for a machine you buy brand new in 2009... Why do they install such an old distribution? This just shows the mediocre performance of Microsoft as a company... Or may be they just do not care of the press they are receiving? Then came the applications, to be precise:

• Firefox 3 browser + AdBlock Plus plugin, forming my base workplace
• Wireless driver for my Canon IP5200R printer
• USB driver for the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner
• Primo PDF virtual PDF printer (to be able to create PDF documents from any application)
• Google Talk and Skype messengers
• WWAN driver for my GSM/HSDPA USB modem

And the workplace preparation has been completed. Look at the list above. What nowadays is the operating system needed for. Does it run applications? No. OK with the exception of the Firefox browser that is in fact the application platform. The rest is just I/O. Printers to make hard copies of electronic documents (to be honest the thing I usually print is the railway ticket when I set up for a business trip). Scanners to move paper documents to the electronic storage. Messengers, being the middleware between the microphone / speakers / webcam and the Internet. Communication hardware drivers to make the device connected wherever possible.

Times have changed. 95% of computer users probably share the list of client - side applications with me. A browser, some additional I/O drivers for external devices and that is it. Intel Atom or better - Qualcomm Scorpion - is more than adequate to run these things. $300 ultra - portable machine capable of serving all of your needs, unless you are a heavy Auto-Cad or Photo-Shop user. Welcome to the netbook generation.