Headworx

People have been saying Apple is the only company capable of forcing wireless carriers (MNOs) to decouple phones (terminals) and phone numbers from network access contracts. The truth is now Google is the other one. Commanding a huge user base, owning the Android OS, the Google Voice service, and now owning a mobile hardware division, Google definitely is in a position to release a decoupled device, with multiple physical, or even a virtualized SIM card slots. It would have a phone number associated with the Google account (not with a SIM card). And would use any network to complete calls. I have a feeling the GSMA is today, where the record labels were, when the first iPod was released and MP3 took the world by storm. SIM cards in 2011 are, where CDs were in 2001. Obsolete products of the old era.

I had a wonderful sabbatical last July. Packed my backpack as light as possible (managed to squeeze everything below 20 lbs) and took off to Peru. So how it looked like from the perspective of electronic devices and what worked and what did not? First of all - the 6" 3G/WiFi Kindle. It was great to have many books (including the Lonely Planet guide) in such a small and lightweight device. Perfect for long flights (Krakow - Frankfurt - Santo Domingo - Panama - Lima) and for long haul bus services in Peru. Kindle was also giving me a backup Internet access. All worked beautifully. Until I broke it. I must have squeezed it too hard in the backpack or something... Anyway at that point I realized how important it was to have paper backup copies of some important documents (like my flight tickets). Electronic platforms are great. But they are so easy to break. The second access device was my faithful Blackberry Torch. Just after I landed in Lima, I realized my mobile carrier (Or...

Despite having wireless connectivity, the Cloud, Facebook, Google+, Dropbox and the entire galaxy of services that enable electronic sharing among people and devices, the user experience (believe it, or not) is still in its infancy. Just recall how "easy" it is to send a photo to a group of friends: take a snapshot with your camera, remove the memory card (or connect the camera to a computer using an USB cable), download it to a local hard drive, learn how to use a cloud service to upload the photo, get the url link to the uploaded copy and paste it to your email application, praying it will become "hot" when you click "send". Then on the other device click "check for new messages", and open the link (if it is not hot, select it - not an easy task on a mouseless device - and paste into the address field of the web browser. Now imagine the possible alternative: you hold your camera, it is aware of the other displays in the neighborhood, you t...

As I wrote before , I took my 3G Kindle to my vacation trip to Peru. After my mobile data had been being cut off by Orange (no data roaming to Peru), the Kindle proved to be the great backup window to the world. It worked as expected, I was able to connect whenever I wanted over any 3G or EDGE network there (for free!) and also read the books I took with me, including the Lonely Planet guide. Until I broke it. I had it in my backpack and have no idea what happened. I must have sit on it or whatever... The display crashed and that was it. Quick realization of the importance of backups (like a paper copy of my flight tickets). After returning home, I contacted Amazon, explaining what I did. They said they were very sorry, but not to worry, as they were shipping me a new one. For free, no questions asked. I talked to them last Tuesday, and the new Kindle arrived on Friday morning. Not a bad timing, considering I was sent from the USA and had to cross the Atlantic and clear the EU customs ...

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...