Headworx

Wireless Carriers (or MNOs - Mobile Network Operators) make it to the top of the hall of fame when it comes to ignoring the existence of the Internet. They see their world span as far as their network coverage does. Or where they have roaming partners. Like German tourists going in hordes where their travel agencies reach. Not a mile further. But, believe it or not, there is a world in places, where there is no 2G or 3G or 4G signal. This is the world I live in. And this is the world I have been visiting over the last three weeks in South America - the Andes and the Amazon jungle. My Peruvian wireless experience started at the Lima airport, where I realized Orange, my MNO, did not have data roaming agreement with any of the Peruvian networks. Can you imagine? GSM is all about compatibility and roaming. We are twenty years since the system was conceived. And all I get is voice roaming. How pathetic... Who uses voice these days? It certainly is not my favorite mobile VAS. By the way, ov...

Thrutu gave one of my favorite presentations at the eComm conference. The idea is simple. Why can't we interact with each other or our connected multi - feature phones while having a voice conversation. Actually not many people even think they should. Plain voice calls have been with us for 150 years. And we do not dare to expect anything more. So when we talk, we just talk. That is it. Nobody expects being able to take a photo and send it over to the other party while talking. Or sending a GPS with map snippet. We are used to saying "when we finish I will send you my address". Or "when we finish I will send you the photo". Why wait until the call is done? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to share a phone's camera while on a call? Or click an icon that will send the GPS coordinates to the other party where it will be rendered by a mapping application? Such simple ideas... yet not available on a broader base. Such multimedia enhancements should be built in...

Read Write World: Democratizing Locative Media was one of my favorite presentations at the last eComm conference. Blaise Aguera y Aracas, who is an architect at Microsoft, working on projects like the Photosynth and Bing Maps was demonstrating how the new media processing technologies applied to crowdsourced content can bring a completely new kind of user experience. We already have the Street View, being able to "walk" along just any street on the planet looking at our screens (or better: the Internet glasses). But the discussed project goes even deeper. During your virtual walk you can enter just about any door or a gate and get inside the street - facing building - a shop or a cafe. Then inside walk and look around and then go back to the street and walk it further down... All the content, being made of real pictures taken by real people, is blended together, forming a complete. fully detailed virtual world. Trekking the Andes, as this blog is posted, I still carry my DSL...

The so called "Experimental" Web browser on Kindle has been the reason I selected this particular eReader, not even thinking of any other. Of course the content selection from Amazon is very rich and chances are even without the Internet I would select Kindle anyway. But still I view the Browser feature as very important, even a breakthrough, as at the moment it is a class of its own, with no competition. Yes, I know, many will raise their eyebrows now. Why? Because browsing the Web on Kindle is free. Wherever you go. Worldwide. On any GSM or 3G network. Yes, I know, many will raise their eyebrows again. What? Exactly what your hear. No contract. No fees. Go and use it. Especially when you travel abroad. Of course the Kindle browser is not a speed demon, and it is monochrome and has no tabs and this and that... But from my experience it runs things like GMail (the simple HTML version) very well. And often email and one or two sites is all you need to stay in touch. As you are...

I have installed the best upgrade to my brain this year. It is called eComm 2011 , and was released last week in San Francisco. It was a continuous and very broad stream of innovative ideas, many of them I will be recalling here on future occasions. And myself I was lucky to be on the stage too, so let me fulfill my duty and add some comments. First two shortcuts: the link to my slides and the excellent follow-up article by Chris Jablonski . After you read Chris' piece, you should have a very good grasp on what the device will be, will look like and how we will be using it, so I will not repeat this. But let me add a few words explaining "why?". There are a number of issues, or even fundamental inconveniences with current mobile phones, which by the way should be considered as mobile personal computers, or personal teleputers (PTs). The first and obvious problem is the physical size. We want to carry the devices with us, so naturally we want them as small, thin and ligh...