"The top 10 (techie) people you should follow on Twitter"

Found the list of good twitters from the link below. I especially liked Padmashree's tweets !
"The top 10 (techie) people you should follow on Twitter"
http://tinyurl.com/bjddzq

3Iphones make 1 Tata Nano !! Why Iphone is not making grounds in India

Tata Nano or popularily called "people's car" was launched At Rs 1,00,000 ($ 2,500 when announced and $ 2,000 on the launch day thanks to Dollar appreciation against Rupee) Tata Nano is the world’s most inexpensive, yet it is a very modern car that gives 100 Km for a charge of 5 liters of petrol, has a stylish finish and meets the European norms for emission.

It will be interesting to watch Tata Nano unfold in the market over the next couple of years. BBC endorsed it best when it calls Tata Nano a demonstration of Indian ingenuity. !!

The unveiling of Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, triggers an important event in the car market. The car cost brings down the cost of ownership of an entry level car in India by 30%

So what does tata nano got to do with my title "3Iphones make 1 nano !!Why Iphone is not making grounds in India". The topic of The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid

By C. K. Prahalad proposes that businesses, governments, and donor agencies stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs as well as value-demanding consumers. He proposes that there are tremendous benefits to multi-national companies who choose to serve these markets in ways responsive to their needs. After all the poor of today are the middle-class of tomorrow.

Since India has a huge base of middle class families if the products satisfy the needs of those growing middle class indians then product will be a hit.

We all know Iphone was a paradigm shifter in mobile industry as it made most of the manufacturers to focus on

> User interface
> Touch

The phone is doing quite good overall with 30 million sales worldwide but still iphone is not huge sucess in India these are few reasons I could think of

> Pricing needs to be bang on ! The iPhone is also priced far beyond the reach of even many middle-class Indian consumers. Even though market research company, estimates iPhones cost less than $175 to build, both Apple and Airtel stuck to the approximately $700 price for the phone in India, vs. $199 with a two-year AT&T contract in the U.S. In India, then, three iPhones equal one Nano, the $2,000 car that Tata Motors (TTM) launched in India just two weeks ago. If we see why Nokia has been strongest player in India The price tags of every Nokia mobile phone is very reasonable. I mean, I can still get a GSM mobile phone for as less as Rs. 1200 ( 22 $) in India with all the basic features and that will last long enough to pay me back with my dues.

> Functionality : Indians just use their phones differently. With spotty data coverage and slow download speeds on non-3G networks, the iPhone just doesn't dazzle the way it does in the U.S. Also, Indian customers like to forward text messages; Nearly 70% of them do that at least once a day. Until recently, the iPhone didn't allow users to do that. "It's a big functionality issue" solved only recently

> Competition : Nokia the world leader in mobile industry along with other players launch mobile phones which are customised to indian needs for eg Nokia 1100 which is simple and easy to use phone which has a torch light which people can use during nights in India. Over 200 million Nokia 1100 cellphones have been sold since its launch in late 2003, making it the world's best selling phone handset

> 3G: Iphone is best used when we use it with applications !! such as google maps on iphone. This would need data connection which works best on 3g etc. 3g is yet to be rolled in India even after the promised to auctioned by Dec 2008. so hopefully launch of 3g and wimax

Many things happening in India ..polictics, launch of Nano, india gaining ground in G20 west finally understanding that fortune is "truelly at bottom of pyramid"

David Wood's visit to Imperial Business school

Today we had a pleasure of having David Wood , EVP of Research at Symbian, Ltd ( my previous employer) in our Business school. David is now responsible for understanding and guiding Symbian's response to disruptive trends in technology, business, and society. I have met David for couple of times in Symbian from my personal opinion he is very humble, has always quest for innovation(which is core to symbian's value) and very well respected person in Symbian.

The talk we had was on "Building the killer mobile experience of 2013" detailing on Innovation, Platforms, Agility and Open source.


It was really a good talk and personally it inspired me in some front for my MBA thesis !! Thesis topic isnt decided yet by me but i think I am moving towards it :)

bye for now need to head for some sleep

Cheerio

why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India

Gaurav makes a very good case why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India after Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

Social media practitioners often talk about it in cryptic “conversation is an art form” terms, but you can break down the social media delivery process in six discrete steps that correspond to the oft-quoted Listen -> Understand -> Engage model:-

1. Data collection
2. Data mining
3. Data analysis
4. Insight delivery
5. Consulting
6. Solution delivery

If you look hard at these six steps, you’ll find that many of them are driven by dynamics that make them very susceptible to outsourcing –

Sudhakar Ram writes below in his column about the first two waves after that i have posted column on third wave of outsourcing !! interesting read go on

As a participant in and observer of the Indian IT industry for over two decades, I can clearly see that software and services exports from India have gone through two waves and that a Third Wave is now unfolding.

Wave 1, which we can trace to the 80s and 90s, clearly established that Indian IT professionals were competent and could be trusted to deliver world-class work. This was the staff augmentation era of the industry, largely serviced through onsite services.

Wave 2, starting off in the mid-90s and currently at its peak, established India as an offshore programming destination. With labor arbitrage as the basic value proposition, Indian companies established large offshore development centers that had competent technical staff, mature CMM processes and world-class infrastructure. While the trigger for Wave 2 was the offshore initiatives by companies like GE, Motorola, Nortel etc., the Y2K bug gave it the necessary momentum. Although things slowed a bit after the dotcom bust, the shrinking IT budgets actually gave an impetus to large Fortune 500 companies to use offshore centers as a mainstream sourcing option.

India Making Millions Servicing U.S. Social Media Ecosystem

By Daya Baran at October 19, 2008 8 Comments

While U.S. companies struggle to figure out how to monetize social media, India’s tech industry has quietly figured out a way to make hundreds of millions (maybe billions) by servicing it. Everything from simple comments on blog posts, to breaking sophisticated Google CAPTCHAs, Craigslist listings, Gmail invites, Yahoo personals, MySpace profiles, YouTube uploads, Facebook friends, and now I hear Twitter tweets are all being performed in India on behalf of social networking sites, blogs, photo sharing, video, and other social media and Web 2.0 sites that depend heavily on online advertising as a revenue source are using these services to boost traffic and users.

For a mere $2 a thousand CAPTCHAs can be solved and a thousand blog comments or MySpace friend requests can be sent generating lots of traffic and links for that property and hence, increasing its online ad revenue. Workers in India process the data using CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

In fact, entire social media and online advertising campaigns featuring cool graphics, widgets, RSS feeds, and other sitewide interactive features are being created and executed from India. “Anything that can be outsourced is being outsourced today in India,” said Rajdeep Sahrawat, vice president of Nasscom, or the National Association of Software Service Companies, an Indian software industry trade organization that closely monitors trends in outsourcing.

India is no longer a call center outsourcing destination. It has rapidly become a global hub servicing the U.S. social media ecosystem and as well as the higher knowledge industries. Services such as tax filing and preparation, medical diagnoses, legal work, and financial portfolio analysis are turning to India for sophisticated knowledge processing and analysis work. A start-up that provides such services is PreMedia Global and in two years, it has grown from a brother-and-sister operation to a company with 900 employees. Initially, they considered launching a call-center operation, said co-founder Kapil Viswanathan, who studied engineering at Stanford University. However, they quickly saw that the nature of outsourcing was changing. “High-end, knowledge-based services — that’s where the growth is coming from,” he said. “We think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The California Fair Trade Coalition said virtually any job that uses a computer could be outsourced, and it argues that U.S. trade laws should be changed to make it more difficult for companies to send work overseas. “Those countries have large and rapidly growing pools of talented people with much lower incomes than people with similar skills in the United States”, Imelda Abarca, director of the coalition. But other experts say the threat to high-end American jobs is overstated. India remains “an undergraduate factory,” said Raffiq Dossani, a Stanford University researcher who studies higher education in the South Asian country. “This limits the kind of work that can be outsourced to India.”

Pervez Sikora, a former U.S. newspaper executive who is now chief operating officer for 2AdPro Media Solutions said he’s been approached by Silicon Valley companies that want to outsource their marketing work. It is not just U.S. companies that are flocking to India. European, Japanese as well as Arab companies are tapping into India’s legions of highly trained graduates that India’s vast college system produces every year. But the number of U.S. companies using these services is expected to increase due to the financial crisis which is forcing them to cut costs.

And, it is no longer simply tech companies that are looking to cut costs using these services - Disney, DreamWorks, and drugs manufacturing companies are also tapping the India pool. “We are getting multiple inquiries a day”, said Todd Brownrout, chief marketing officer at 2AdPro, which expects to expand from 350 employees to 1,000 next year. Two years ago, it was a tough sell to convince newspaper executives that someone sitting halfway across the globe could produce ads that are accurate and on-time. Sanjiv Gupta, chief executive of Hyderabad-based Pressmart, which provides Internet technology services to publications, argues this outsourcing model can be applied to editorial content. “It’s outsourcing of creativity,” he said.

While the debate continues over just which American jobs may be vulnerable to outsourcing, executives like Sikora acknowledge that the new global economic order is forcing Americans to reposition their careers. “People have to understand how jobs are changing and start reinventing themselves,” he said. “No one will be able to stop this now.”

Is 3G and WIMAX disruptive for India?

As India is preparing for the rollout end of this year to mid next year of 3G and WiMax services it represents a significant move forward for the Indian mobile telecoms Industry. I could find some very positive news that India to have 230 m 3G subscribers by 2013

3G and variations of it first got rolled out in Japan back in 2001. 3G essentially allows you to shift data faster over the mobile phone network thereby opening up many new services and possibilities (such as video telephony and high speed data services for downloading information and surfing the web). WiMax is similar to home wireless technology. Where-as home wifi only reaches out a few hundred feet, WiMax has a much wider range many across kilimeter. It also offers speeds that are far greather than 3G. To WiMax in to reality, just image that you can be anywhere in the city of Mumbai, lets say, and flip open your laptop and get on to the web instantly regardless of where you stand. Work from the park, the local Cafe Coffe Day, from home or at the airport terminal. WiMax allows this and that too at high speed.

The advantage of 3G to mobile phone operators is that there are a lot of phone models in the market aleady which already support 3G out-of-the-box. With further investment in installing 3G transmission towers the basic infrastructure for 3G in India can be rapidly rolled out. WiMax, on the other hand, could take a little longer to become widespread. The equipment necessary to receive WiMax signals isn’t readily available in India yet and transmissions in the WiMax spectrum is some-what limited to date. In India, Tata Communications has been experiementing with a WiMax trial and Bangalore and hopes to expand this across Mumbai and Delhi once spectrum has been allocated.

What really interests me is that WiMax has the potential to reach remote rural populations in India where existing mobile coverage is patchy or non-existant. This would open up the possibility of bridging the digital divide and binging the advantages of access to the Internet to whole new communities. History has shown that Internet access in rural areas of India has been mostly a good thing with a great examples being the e-Choupal project, which enables farmers to get price of grain and seed direct from market instead of going through the middle man via internet terminal in their villages and farms.

Access to the internet in rural areas also spreads the influence of better and wider education to all of India’s population, helping to unlock the latant tallent of a youthful and eager work force. Ultimately, however, as technologies like WiMax and 3G reach the masses, it will enable India to innovate and invent in ways it hasn’t done so before. Entepreneurs up and down the country as well as would-be entrepreneurs will suddenly have a new medium to release their ideas through. When I look at the divide between the uptake of broadband internet and mobile telephony in India, the choice today is clear. More Indian’s today own and use a mobile phone and the number of mobile subscribers dwarfs the number of broadband intenet subscribers. Everyone from your ricksha-wala to duba-wala, city slicker to gardener, cleaner to call centre worker now owns a mobile phone and the uptake is unstopable.

Although market saturation of mobile phone ownership is some years off in India, like its global counterparts, Indian telco’s will eventually start to feel the pinch and one way to sustain and increase revenue is to expand sevice offerings.

3G and WiMax will enable Indian telco’s to offer their subscriber base a multitude of new services including premium video content, video to video chat between hand-sets (and cross network), selling software to mobile phone business users and innovating in the burgeoning mobile phone games industry. Like it’s console games counterpart, mobile gaming is booming in International makets and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in India once the networks enable people to download large files to their phones. Culturally, Indian’s differ in many ways to the world at large and one of those differences is the high value placed on education. Nintendo already realises this and its DS games console, coupled with the plethora of recent educational titles that you play on the Nintendo DS is taking off like hot-cakes. This is a natural appeal and fit with the Indian psychi and mind-set.

Finally, 3G will allow Indian users to upload photos and videos from their phones to the web and partipicate in the mobile social networking space beyond the confines of SMS and becomes what is coined as citizen journalists. Indian teleco’s will probably offer a selection of data packages to subscibers, although like the west, most teleco’s will no-doubt standardise data tarrifs on flat rate “eat as much as you like” structures to reduce confusion and streamline billing.

There are countless ways the Indian telco’s and consumers will benefit from 3G and WiMax and I cannot wait for this market to blossom in India. With over 71 countries now offering 3G to its consumers, it’s time for India to join the 3G club and perhaps suplant it altogether with WiMax.

Go India go !

Nokia Research on Mobile Phone Usage

Pretty interesting to know that nokia is going to bottom of pyramid for mobile innovations

Communication Literacy Design

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: literacy delhi)

Shared Phone Use

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: charging power)

State of Iphone Satisfaction

http://technologizer.com/2008/09/30/iphone-satisfaction/

Five Key Trends in Mobile Devices Through 2009

Source : Gartner

Gartner has identified five major trends that will impact the mobile device market through 2009, in areas ranging from partner “ecosystems” and competitive landscapes to innovations in device usability and interfaces. The trends include:

Established Vendors Consolidate and New Players Join the Fray. New device vendors, such as Apple and Garmin, are looking to differentiate themselves, while big-name vendors, such as Motorola, face pressure as market shares decline and design innovation becomes increasingly challenging. The lower cost of mobile phone reference designs and modules, as well as the appeal of such a large market, will attract more conventional consumer electronics companies to join the market.

Device Vendors Build Out Ecosystems. Pressure from operators to lower the price of devices will drive some established players to seek out new sources of revenue from content and services sold to end users. This trend is epitomised by Nokia with Ovi, Sony Ericsson with PlayNow and Apple with its iTunes store. This new market will bring changes in relationships between vendors, operators and content providers. Applications relevant to enterprises, such as location and navigation, will increasingly become available directly from device vendors that are integrating GPS into their products.

Devices Makers Will Focus on Removing Complexity for the User. Increasing device functionality and a need for differentiation will drive demand to simplify the user interface (UI) and service experience. As a consequence, mobile device vendors need to build up their UI competencies while retaining familiarity as well as considering how users can move horizontally across their devices’ applications, rather than simply vertically within them.

Mobile Devices Increasingly Become Lifestyle Statements. Style will play more of a role across the range of devices, driven not only by fashion trends but also by consumers’ desires to reinforce their lifestyle choices. Vendors need to have established platforms on which small changes to casings and colours can be made without impacting costs. They will also need to consider partnering with nonmobile companies and brands — such as consumer electronics, fashion or sports companies — to increase the lifestyle appeal and consumer reach of their products.

High-End Device Platforms Become “Field-Refreshable." As cellular technologies become part of increasingly expensive consumer devices, vendors must manage ongoing support, upgrades and enhancement of drives. Because many users will hold onto high-end devices longer, these platforms will need more life cycle management in the form of upgrades and enhancements. Some vendors are implementing these “field refreshes” that can be made to support new digital rights management (DRM) requirements, download bug fixes, or download new applications, wallpapers or skins to keep devices up-to-date.

Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

Interesting times ... sure open world does not want monopoly by one company ( google) as we need a change and change is always healthy ..rightly by Kaizen models :))

/Praveen

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html?_r=2&ref=technology&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Skip to next paragraph

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

Grow your mobile in a pot? Maybe someday, say Nokia researchers

Certainly interesting article !!

Source http://www.physorg.com/news135927830.html

The world's leading mobile phone maker Nokia has worked for years with top experts to determine the needs and wants of tomorrow's customers in order to stay ahead of aggressive new competitors

With a mobile phone you can make calls on the go, shoot photos and pinpoint your position on a map. And who knows, maybe one day you'll be able to grow your phone in a pot, if the futuristic ideas of technology researchers come true.

The world's leading mobile phone maker Nokia has worked for years with top experts to determine the needs and wants of tomorrow's customers in order to stay ahead of aggressive new competitors Google and Apple as well as the more traditional device makers Samsung, LG and Motorola.

In 2007, the Finnish company spent some 5.6 billion euros (8.9 billion dollars), or about 11 percent of its 51-billion-euro net sales, on research and development.

About 27 percent of its employees, or more than 30,000 people, work on research and development, 700 of whom are part of Nokia's long-term research unit.

The Nokia Research Centre is a global organisation with activities in Britain, the United States, China, Switzerland and Finland, among others.

"Right now we are looking for things that could be relevant for Nokia in 2015. It might be that the patent for a product is relevant in 2015 but that the actual product is further away," Leo Kaerkkaeinen, a chief visionary at the Nokia Research Centre, told AFP.

He would not disclose the industry secrets Nokia was working on but said the starting point for researchers was that anything was possible.

"We are playing with possibilities. Maybe some time in the future mobile phones will grow in a pot like plants or maybe you could print a new phone," he joked.

Built-in antennae are one of the centre's inventions and they are now a part of every mobile phone on the market.

A more recent example is the Nokia Sports Tracker, which uses a GPS sensor to record sports enthusiasts' location, speed, distance and time, enabling users to store the information on the website and share with others.

The Sports Tracker software has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times and it has 75,000 active users, according to Nokia.

In February, Nokia launched its "Morph nanotechnology concept" with the University of Cambridge which could result in mobile devices made of flexible and self-cleaning materials within the next seven years.

A jogger might find it handy to wrap his cell phone around his wrist or head during a workout, especially since the phone repels perspiration -- and mud.

But what makes companies want to invest vast amounts of money in experiments that will only bear fruit many years down the road, if at all, at a time when investors are increasingly focused on quarterly profits?

"Futures research can help companies evaluate coming risks and possibilities, while giving them time to react and a competitive edge over their competitors," Sirkka Heinonen, a professor at Finland Futures Research Centre at the Turku School of Economics, told AFP.

She noted the three main principles of futures studies -- the future cannot be precisely predicted, it is not predestined and people can have an impact on it. "Today's choices and decisions make the future.

"The future is like a landscape that we try to see more clearly and to which we will draw road maps," Heinonen explained.

People have always wanted to know what tomorrow will bring but systematic, modern futures research began in the 1940s when German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim started to talk about futurology.

In the 1950s, some US firms began studying scenario analysis. In Finland, futures research only took hold in the late 1970s.

While companies like Nokia or lift and escalator maker Kone have since been actively involved in the field, not all industries have risen to the challenge, with many opting for immediate profits over long-term investments.

Heinonen said the Finnish paper industry, struggling with rising costs while overcapacity has kept a lid on paper prices, was one industry that could really benefit from drawing up a forward looking scenario.

Nokia meanwhile takes its future seriously.

"Nokia is not just looking to expand its product portfolio but also for new services to expand it. The Research Centre's job is also to look for something totally different -- like should Nokia start making household robots or medical diagnosis systems," Kaerkkaeinen said.

Kaerkkaeinen revealed that Nokia was conducting trials on mobile phones that could help diagnose illnesses, technology that could be used in regions where the nearest doctor is far away.

In Palo Alto, California, Nokia has also studied whether GPS censors in mobile phones can be used to forecast traffic flows.

"We put a hundred cars into traffic and followed how they impacted the accuracy of traffic forecasts. The results were encouraging," Kaerkkaeinen said.

During the past few years growing demand for consumer products, such as cell phones in emerging markets like China and India, has been important for Nokia's success.

Last year nearly 20 percent of its sales came from the two countries.

The company is now conducting studies to improve its understanding of future emerging markets in order to better meet customers' needs.

In India's IT hub Bangalore, Nokia's team is collaborating with Srishti School of Design and the MIT Media Lab in a project studying how urbanisation impacts society and technology's role in it.

"We are looking into how to narrow the digital divide when people do not have any technical background knowledge whatsoever," Kaerkkaeinen said.

Good summary of whats happening in mobile market

See the video below !

http://web20.telecomtv.com/pages/?id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10&vidid=3098&view=video&page=1

Assignment: Platform Wars: Will Android allow the IT industry to Seize the Mobile Value Chain?

What are open platforms and open networks, and why are they important? New operating systems such as Android & LiMo appear to be more than just new technologies. Do they really challenge the current mobile network operator business model by turning the mobile terminal into a mobile applications platform rather than a services terminal? This programme looks at this clash of ideas by identifying the three different players: 'openness advocates', 'bit pipe avoiders' and 'middle wayers'.

Name: Sy Choudhury, Geoff Blaber, Masayoshi Son, Kai Oistamo, Nigel Clifford
Title: Staff Product Manager, Director of Devices, President & CEO, EVP, CEO
Company: Qualcomm, CCS Insight, Softbank Mobile, Nokia, Symbian
Recorded: 15/07/2008 - Various

Microsoft Ready to Hit Back at Mac Guy

I would love to see microsoft advertise their strength rather than drawbacks of MAC etc !! go MS go

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/07/09/microsoft-ready-to-hit-back-at-mac-guy/
Microsoft Ready to Hit Back at Mac Guy

Microsoft is set to strike back at Apple and others who have spent the last year and a half criticizing its Windows Vista operating system.
empire_art_160_20080709173057.jpg
Is this image too obvious?

We wrote about Vista’s image problem last winter, when the operating system was facing a barrage of negative press and a clever ad campaign by Apple that alleged Vista was a failure and full of problems. At the time, Microsoft told us that it had no plans for a counteroffensive or even to defend itself against the charges. Instead of acknowledging the attack ads, Microsoft hoped to change minds by continuing to talk up Vista’s benefits.

That didn’t work. Vista’s image is as bad as ever. Even businesses say they’ll avoid upgrading to it, according to one report. Last week, Microsoft replaced the advertising company it used for its business-to-business campaigns. Yesterday, Brad Brooks, a vice president in charge of Windows marketing, speaking at a Microsoft conference, said that the time had come to fight back. Finally.

“We’re drawing a line right here on this stage,” he told a crowd of Microsoft business partners, according to a transcript. “You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping? Well, we’ve woken up and it’s time to take our message forward,” he added. Brooks specifically mentioned Apple and that company’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads.

Over the next few weeks, Microsoft will roll out an ad campaign intended to change peoples’ minds about Vista. The company is tight-lipped about what those ads will look like, but they should be more aggressive than anything we’ve seen to date. A rather conventional full-page ad for a version of Vista aimed at small businesses that ran in today’s Journal isn’t a part of the campaign, a company spokesperson tells the Business Technology Blog.

So what will the new ads look like? Microsoft isn’t saying, so we’ve come up with some ideas: A hip-looking professionals tries to use business software that doesn’t run on a Mac; a man talks about the improved security in Vista, and we learn at the end of the ad that he’s an Apple employee; a Pepsi-challenge-style computer taste test; a deep-voiced narrator rehashes every strategic blunders Apple has ever made while ominous music plays in the background — paid for by the Friends of Vista, of course.

Any other suggestions for Microsoft’s counterattack?

The Top Ten 3G iPhone beaters

source : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/11/round_up_iphone_rivals/

I dont quite agree to this top ten list since there are SonyEricsson P1 and W960 which could be easily in this list. anyhoo here goes the list by reghardware

Round-up Sick to the teeth of 3G iPhone this and 3G iPhone that? Then express your anti-Apple anger by selecting one our list of the top ten feature-packed alternatives. Counting down, in reverse order, we kick of with the
with the...

Motorola Z10
Click here for the full review

The Z10 is a step up from the original kick sliding Z8, but it’s still not up there with the very best smartphones. Top-level features like integrated GPS and Wi-Fi support are absent on this phone, though it does have high-speed HSDPA 3G data connectivity. The camera is decent but not a top-notch shooter. There’s the size factor too - you may expect a larger display given the phone’s footprint. General phone performance was good but there were issues with occasional software glitches and sometimes sluggish keypad responsiveness on our review sample.

Reg Rating: 70%

Palm Treo 500v
Click here for the full review

Palm's Treo 500v isn't the 'power users' Windows Mobile device - no Wi-Fi; no HSDPA just plain old 3G - but it's an impressive attempt at bringing the handset family into the reach of the mainstream. It's wonderfully compact and it looks good. Palm's new UI is a big improvement on the standard WM one, and its micro-keyboard is as easy to use as anything on a BlackBerry or HTC device.

Reg Rating: 70%

Samsung SGH-F700
Click here for the full review

It's hard to ignore the slight whooshing noise the F700 makes as it slips between two stools. If you want a cool gadget for surfing the web and media playback you're going to want an iPhone, with its Wi-Fi and better-than-the-rest browser. If you want something that does just about everything your PC does but is phone-sized and you're not concerned about using a stylus, you'll be wanting an HTC TyTn II or something similar. Should Samsung have perhaps partnered up with Google for the F700's OS, given it 8GB of memory and Wi-Fi and then really gone iPhone-hunting under the guise of the first Android smartphone?

Reg Rating: 75%

Motorola Moto Q 9h
Click here for the full review

Not the prettiest of smartphones, and crucially lacking Wi-Fi, document editing and GPS, the Moto Q 9h is nevertheless very easy to use. Its robust and well-spaced keys make it easy to handle messaging and the entertainment functions outperform its uncool, BlackBerry-wannabe looks.

Reg Rating: 75%

HTC Touch Diamond
Click here for the full review

The Touch Diamond may not be perfect, but it's small, light, well equipped and comes with a smooth, clever and reliable 3D user interface that looks great and keeps you well away from Windows Mobile. The screen and web browser are both particularly fine. Our biggest concern is the lack of a memory card slot, which on a high-end smartphone in this day and age is tough to explain or justify.

Reg Rating: 80%

Nokia N78
Click here for the full review

From its sleek, minimalist good looks to its raft of impressively well-integrated features, the N78 is a gorgeous little number. The 3.2-megapixel camera, feature-packed music player, Assisted GPS and maps, quality web browser plus documents readers and email make it an ideal travelling companion for business or pleasure.

Reg Rating: 85%

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HTC Touch Dual
Click here for the full review

This is the phone the original Touch should always have been. A faster chip, the addition of a slide-out Qwerty keypad and high-speed HSDPA 3G along with various minor tweaks here and there have resulted in a handset that is easy to use, versatile, smart and robust. Good to see HTC back on track.

Reg Rating: 85%

Nokia N81 8GB
Click here for the full review

If you’re looking for plenty of track storage in a smartphone, the N81 is a lower-cost alternative to the N95. It doesn’t come with the same wealth of functionality as the N95 – no GPS and a lower-quality camera than the N95’s five-megapixel job. The design's slick but the plastic casing gives the N81 a cheap feel. And while the controls are cluttered and definitely not as ergonomic as they could be the music player performance is excellent.

Reg Rating: 85%

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O2 XDA Orbit 2
Click here for the full review

What's not to like about the O2 XDA Orbit 2? For the money, you're getting a perfectly decent Windows Mobile smartphone and a capable satnav system. When you consider that you can get the thing free with a £45-a-month contract or for only £50 with a £35-a-month contract and that it comes bundled with £80-odd worth of CoPilot 7 software, it's also quite the bargain.

Reg Rating: 90%

Nokia N95 8GB
Click here for the full review

With the N95 8GB, Nokia has added significant improvements to an already feature-loaded multimedia mobile. The enhancements aren’t solely cosmetic - it’s not just an iPhone-challenging memory upgrade either. Nokia has refined the screen design to make it more media-friendly, enhanced the GPS system, and worked in a number of software upgrades. Battery performance has been extended. It’s still quite a large handset, which may put off some buyers. But the real heavyweight you get is the package of useful and entertaining features in what is a sophisticated smartphone.

Reg Rating: 95%

iPhone 3G: Faster, cheaper but still not perfect

Source : http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/iphone-3g-faster-cheaper-still-not-perfect/2008-07-09?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&cmp-id=EMC-NL-FW&dest=FW

The handful of lucky reviewers to have early access to the iPhone 3G have revealed their analysis of the new device, which goes on sale Friday, July 11. The conclusion: the iPhone 3G is cheaper and faster (if you're lucky enough to be in one of AT&T's HSPA markets) but it still has some issues such as battery life (higher power demands from the 3G network cause the battery to drain quicker) and there's no Bluetooth or video capabilities. Here's a snapshot of the reviews:

• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Pro: The new iPhone is much, much faster at fetching data over cell phone networks because it uses a speedy cellular technology called 3G. And it now sports a GPS chip for better location sensing. Con: The iPhone 3G's battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone has a sealed battery that can't be replaced with a spare. For more, read the article or watch this video of Mossberg's review.
• David Pogue of The New York Times. Pro: The audio quality of the iPhone 3G has taken a gigantic step forward. "You sound crystal clear to your callers, and they sound crystal clear to you. Few cell phones are this good." Plus, Pogue praises the iPhone App Store, which he says is a central, complete, drop-dead simple online catalog of new programs for the iPhone. Con: AT&T's 3G coverage is spotty. A coverage map reveals that in 16 states, only three cities or fewer are covered. In 10 states there is no coverage at all. For more, read the review here.
• Edward Baig of USA Today. Pro: Messages and calendar entries are "pushed" to the device, so they show up right away, just as they do on other computers. Set-up is a cinch. Con: You still cannot shoot video or take advantage of Bluetooth stereo or dial with a voice command. For more, see the full review.

An iPhone with a keyboard?

By Guy Kewney, NewsWireless.Net http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/30/iphone_keyboard/

Published Monday 30th June 2008 15:41 GMT

It is an article of faith, of course, that whatever Steve Jobs does is right. And so, since the iPhone currently has no keyboard on it, it must logically follow that it is wrong to have a keyboard, and therefore that Steve Jobs will never produce a version that does have a keyboard.
Fervent fans can therefore see no reason to change the iPhone from its current "type on the touch screen, or not at all" design. As one of the more zealous remarked when the suggestion was even mentioned: "The only people who think it needs a keyboard are people who have never used it."
Rumours from inside Cupertino suggest that Jobs himself doesn't have this sort of religious hangup about his own work. Reports from inside mobile operators show that whether or not he ever makes it work, he is already trying to make a "slide-out" keyboard for a corporate version of the iPhone.
If this version does appear on the market, it won't be this year, and certainly won't be aimed at the consumer market. Consumers love the sleek, elegant design of the iPhone, and quickly fall in love with the on-screen keyboard.
But Steve Jobs can do the sums. In America, iPhone has perhaps overtaken Blackberry in total sales - but these sales are in what they call "the executive corridor."
Worldwide, it has not escaped the attention of mobile network execs that the bulk of corporate sales are not into the executive corridor. Rather, they are phones which are provided for staff, and the vast bulk of them have full-QWERTY keyboards - and all the best-selling ones, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and HTC alike, have slide-out keyboards. The popular Danger Sidekick, too, has a slide-out (spin-out) QWERTY keyboard.
The market which buys these phones, wants QWERTY and they don't want to type on the screen. They "just know" that they wouldn't like it.
Arguably, they're wrong, of course. Quite conceivably, after a week of sending emails typed on the touch-screen of the iPhone, they'd "get it" and love it. But how will they ever find out?
Compare the numbers: those who have never used it, versus those who have. It may cross your mind that perhaps it would be a good option to provide if you want to increase sales and expose sceptics to the new user interface.
The issue is, of course, a classic religious wars subject. We had similar wars over Intel chips, when the faithful maintained that the PowerPC chips inside the Apple Mac family were four times faster than Intel processors, and that Jobs would never abandon them.
And before that there was the operating system. The Mac OS was inherently superior to anything *nixy and so no Unix system would be able to keep up. Before that, the Motorola 68000 family was equally sacrosanct.
Will Jobs launch an iPhone with a keyboard? He says "definitely not" and is emphatic about it. So that's that.
Well, yes, and then again maybe. What he is apparently doing is canvassing the idea with operators. "If you had a keyboard version, how many would you take?"
And he has taken this beyond just chatting: actual prototypes - not just mockups - have been sent to senior executives at some operators. I'm not allowed to even hint which operators... but I can report that the keyboard has "issues" which are not yet resolved.
In another part of the forest, of course, Apple's rivals have the opposite problem. They want touch-screen technology and they are working hard on it. And they, too, have "issues" with making it work properly.
Sources inside one operator say that there definitely will not be a slide-out keyboard this year. But, I'm told, they are definitely expecting to see one, aimed specifically at corporate buyers, around this time next year.
Like all rumours it's premature, and people can change their minds. But it's not speculation. The prototypes actually exist and they (nearly) work.
It's also worth remembering that operators aren't Apple. They don't have the Apple design flair, the creative vision, or the urge to rock the boat. And they are looking at a surge in sales of HTC phones, all based on Windows Mobile, and many with really cute slide-out keyboards. "If that is where the mobile buyers are going," they think, "we should go there too."
If Jobs actually launches one to capture this market, will it succeed?
That's another question entirely! Contrary to the protestations of the zealots, this would not be the death-knell of the iPhone.
After all, the no-keyboard iPhone does not depend for its credibility on the absence of an alternative keyboard version. It either works or it doesn't. Anybody who has learned to use it will know that it works adequately, but you will find people who say that they'd prefer a real keyboard.
My own experience is that it works for iPhone standard things. That is to say it's great at web browsing and all the functions that iPod music playing requires, and wonderful for scanning photographs. It is, in short, a genuine innovation in user interfaces, and a successful innovation.
But innovation isn't what users all want. Many of us are conservative. Long memories are needed to go back to the days of WordStar text editing, and the resistance that people trained on WordStar put up when asked to use WordPerfect. And in their turn, WordPerfect users absolutely refused to adapt to Microsoft Word, however innovative the GUI might have been; Microsoft had to produce a version of Word which obeyed WP keystrokes.
In the phone business, users are notoriously conservative. Users of Sony Ericsson devices denounce Nokia as "plain wrong!" and vice versa; and yet really, the differences are trivial.
When it comes to keyboard skills, texting speedsters regard predictive T9 typing as wimpish. Both T9 and triple-type texters regard QWERTY phones like the Nokia E61 or the Blackberry or the HTC devices as perverse.
So it really isn't much use going to the dyed-in-the-wool qwerty button-pusher and saying: "But this is inherently better!" in evangelising tones. Like a small child who won't try porridge because they don't like it, they know they don't like it... so they won't try. And many people who hate Guinness have, similarly, never tasted a drop. That's human nature!
In the long run, it really doesn't matter to Apple whether people who get a keyboard on their office iPhone end up never using it. As long as they get an office iPhone, they have the chance of trying it, and maybe falling in love. As long as their company phone is a Blackberry or an HTC Touch or a Sony Ericsson X1 or a Nokia E61, they'll use it and regard the iPhone with suspicion.
Steve Jobs switched from Motorola to PowerPC to Intel chips. He does what he needs to do to sell stuff. If he has to put a keyboard on the back of some iPhones to sell more of them, my bet is he'll do it

How does Firefox make 100 million a year?

...runs out in November 2008. It'll be interesting to see how much this is valued at. Not that Mozilla need to worry, they have significant retained earnings from the revenue they've generated in the last few years.

More here;

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9802922-39.html

Source: http://ninetofiveblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-does-firefox-make-100-million-year.html

This is a sneaky way of making money by piggybacking on Google ads.

Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker... disclosed how much money Mozilla made from their Firefox web browser in 2005: $52.9 million.

Figures were not disclosed for 2006 but Baker did say the foundation’s 2003 revenue was $2.4 million and 2004 revenue was $5.8 million. You can take a guess at 2006 revenue and project 2007 revenue based on that. Now the obvious question; How does Firefox make money?

You see that little Google search box on the upper right? If you use that box to make a search and click on one of the Google ads from the results page, Firefox gets an estimated 80% of the money. In addition to the search box, Mozilla also makes money from searches made on the Firefox start page .

The Google search box adds value and income to Firefox and that is the key to making big money on the Net. Users of Firefox don’t see the Google search box as advertising. Instead they see is as a value added service and they don’t mind that Mozilla makes money from the sponsored links. Most of them don’t even know Firefox makes money from it. I’m sure if they find out it made over $50 million in 2005, they will be shocked. LINK.

Why S60 apps suck

Source : Why S60 apps suck

http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/2008/05/19/why-s60-apps-suck/

By admin

Michael Mace has been on my radar for a long time - being a former PalmSource employee and running a nice blog definitely qualifies you to be on my watchlist(as I also run a Palm OS site). He recently posted an article about why Nokia’s S60 platform will fall behind the iPhone eventually - he claims that it all has to do with marketing. And - unfortunately - I happen to disagree(*).

For me, S60 sucks because of a variety of different reasons:

Rampant piracy AND signage crap
S60v§ introduced the need for application signing. If your app wanted to do certain things, you needed to get it signed(which cost you 180 Euros or more). No signage, no workie.

This is similar to the concept Tapwave used with its Palm OS-based game console - but there’s one major difference here. Tapwave’s Zodiac checked if a signed app was modified, and refused to run modified apps.

Crackers had to either break the entire DRM system(which they couldn’t do) or had to resign the app(which would have forced them to give up their address and real name).

The two factors above made the Zodiac a piracy-free platform; and thus made developers accept the burden of application signing. Nokia, on the other hand, insists on signing but does not offer any benefits in exchange…

Stupid development mantra
I have developed applications for Palm OS, Windows Mobile and a variety of other systems(including even 14bit PIC MCU’s). Each system definitely has its own oddities - but Nokia’s S60 is full of weird crap.

Leaving functions? A cleanup stack? The four-object base model? Views? Loads of concepts that are unique to the S60/UIQ world.

This makes developer training expensive and development hard - and reduces the motivation for the development of S60 apps.

Carbide.c++ costs a LOT of cash
Finally, Carbide.c++ costs a load of money. For me, this is the straw that lays the camel flat - have a totally fuxated development model AND charge big bucks for the IDE. If Nokia wants to grow its followership, give away Carbide Pro with a book for 100€. Restrict it to single-developer shacks. But do it…

Cutting a long story short: for me, the reason for Nokia’s problems lays in the operating system’s architecture. Sure, S60 is a great, stable and well-usable OS - but developing for it is a huge pain in the butt. Eliminating piracy would put Nokia into a unique position on the marketplace - but the opportunity apparently has not been realized by anyone in the S60 camp so far…

Top reasons why people dont buy application software for smartphones

Quote from http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/05/nokia-goes-for-1-market-share-in-us.html

There are a lot of reasons --

1. lack of awareness that they can do it,

2. lack of a built-in software store on the device, incompatibility between various versions of S60, etc.

3. But one huge reason is because no one has ever made a compelling case to most users on why they should care about smartphone software.

Mobile presence an upcoming trend ?

Extending mobile presence - the need for context and device state information

I speak to a broad variety of vendors and operators about presence in a mobile context. It crops up repeatedly both for operator-centric developments like IMS and RCS, and also for independent applications like mobile VoIP and corporate unified comms.

In theory, mobile phones ought to be good platforms for presence information - both rudimentary connection details (online, offline, idle etc) and some personalised state or emotional content as well ("Dean is currently thinking about lunch" and so on).

In addition, the network is sometimes able to add some extra information about the user - maybe location cell ID, whether the user is on a call, whether they are connected via fixed or mobile and so forth.

All this is useful, and currently highly under-exploited. There is a lot of work needed just to prove the current user experience and gain adoption. Although I can't see anyone actually paying for presence directly, it potentially enhances other services, and could also generate increased traffic and call completion.

But at the same time, I think the mobile presence industry is missing a trick. The presence client on a phone ought to be able to pick up a lot more information about the device's - and the user's - context. In particular, it would be fantastic if it could pick up details from the underlying phone APIs, and enable that data to be exploited by clever applications in the network, or directly by a contact. So for example - whether the phone is on charge, or is running low on battery. Or whether the user is using a Bluetooth headset. Or that the accelerometer can detect motion that looks like walking or driving. Or that the memory for SMS's is almost full.

These are just some ideas, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of clever things that could be achieved with this approach.

(Yes, clearly privacy is a huge concern here, but let's assume that we can simultaneously invent some form of reasonably-effective permissioning system - perhaps an easier version of that seen on sites like Facebook)

Now clearly a fundamental issue is that phones differ in many of these regards. I don't think there's a standardised API for % battery remaining for example, and the SMS memory may be split between phone, SIM and memory card. Different OS's and models of phone have very different capabilities which would make creating "common denominators" extremely difficult.

But maybe we could start with a couple of basic aspects - perhaps standardised by OMTP or OMA - and then incrementally add more features over time.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to catalyse development of this type of concept. Bodies like the 3GPP shy away from dependency on mobile phone-resident software, often naively believing that everything of value can be done from the network core. It may be that we will need to rely either on operator-customised handset platforms (DoCoMo, maybe?) , or third-party software providers, probably from VoIP or IM backgrounds (Truphone? Skype? social networking clients?). We're getting there first with location context (Loopt, fring and others do this), but that still not providing data at the level of "device state".

On the other hand, one of the downsides of any extensions to current mobile presence technology would be the amount of extra signalling traffic involved. I'm already hearing that the IMS-centric view of a "presence enabled phonebook" is running into scaling problems. If you have 100 entries in a contact list, and you expect all of them to be continually updated, this causes a huge amount of (typically SIP) traffic. It also requires presence clients to be running continually in the background on devices, with consequent implications for power consumption.

Where will the internet in relation to mobile be in 5 years?

http://www.intomobile.com/2008/03/12/where-will-the-internet-in-relation-to-mobile-be-in-5-years.html

Nokia is holding an event in London tomorrow where they're inviting a few of the local bloggers to a round table discussion where they'll discuss the future of mobile handsets, the internet and the direction Nokia needs to be heading in to be prepared for the future. I'm glad to see Rafe Blandford from All About Symbian is going and I hope he sees this before he gets on a train tomorrow and prints it out and gives it to the people at Nokia UK.

Devices will get better cameras, faster processors, longer battery life and snazzier interfaces. What this piece focuses on is the future of the internet in relation to the mobile ecosystem.

The industries that were built around microprocessors, social networks, displays, software and services will intersect within 5 years due to what is currently happening in the mobile telecommunications space. It may not seem obvious right now, but that little device in your pocket will change everything.

It all begins with the chip. Processors today are cut from 300 mm silicon wafers. As the size of transistors decreases from 65 nanometers to 45 nanometers to eventually 32 nanometers, more chips can be extracted per wafer. There is already a push for the companies who participate in this industry to transition to 450 mm wafers; when you combine that with 32 nanometer technology the math says that only 7 fabs will be needed to satisfy the world’s needs for transistors. Where are you going to put those extra processors?

People want to see and manipulate information in rich ways. The number of LCD displays being shipped grows 30% year on year and in 2011 over 165 million units are predicted to be sold according to analyst firm iSuppli. Sharp expects that in 2015 the average size of a television set inside European homes will be 60 inches. The majority of displays today are next to useless without the aid of an external output device or an antenna to display a picture. In 2007 LG introduced the first television with built in WiFi, HP later presented a model that also had wireless networking along with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Extender software preinstalled. Televisions are starting to become smarter.

The world has never been this small. FaceBook is the most talked about social network today, while MySpace remains the most popular in terms of numbers of users, neither of these services can talk to one another and likewise the other social networks such as LinkedIn and Bebo remain oblivious to the each other’s existence. People today are getting tired of having to declare who they are and restating their relationships to their friends and acquaintances. The trend towards a singular identity is already underway with OpenID and as of July 2007 there are over 120 million people and 4,500 sites using the technology. Defining your relationships is currently being worked on; two possible solutions are FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and XFN (XHTML Friends Network). Why don’t we manage the list of people we know and our relationship to them from one location and let services be created around this information?

HTML, for the most part, is platform independent, now it’s time to bring that same philosophy to other forms of information. Operating Systems are becoming less and less relevant today as software is moving towards becoming but a mere website inside a browser, sadly this method of information delivery doesn’t fully exploit the potential of the hardware underneath. The rich capabilities and experiences that were enjoyed by natively written applications are beginning to come back thanks to the rise of Rich Internet Application runtimes. Adobe, which rules the browser thanks to Flash, is moving on to the desktop space with Air and trying to increase Flash Lite penetration within mobile devices. Microsoft, which rules the desktop arena, is trying to get into the web with Silverlight and into mobile with the same runtime. Nokia purchased Trolltech for their Qt framework which spans Windows, Mac and Linux and will soon bring that runtime to all their S40, S60 and Maemo devices. Write once, run anywhere is being attempted, again, but this time across multiple platforms that each have their own unique experiences.

Tying this all together, the future of all these industries will be impacted by mobile in a way that is too mysterious and grand to currently comprehend, but some general predictions can be made:

Our phone book will manage our single identity and our single list of contacts. When the switch to IP v6 is complete everyone on this planet will have their own namespace and everyone’s mobile phone will act as a server. Everything you do, whether it is in the real world or on the internet, can and will be enhanced by the social element; our social networks will be like air. Displays will surround us everywhere we go and they’ll be connected to not only the internet, but to our mobile devices via a local connection. If one were to walk into a hotel room, a friend’s house or a bar there should be a display that detects your phone, asks you if you would like to initiate a connection and then present you with a stunning interface that can be manipulated with your mobile device. I’m not talking about TV out ladies and gentlemen; I’m talking about a separate user interface created specially for my television using one of the new cross platform runtimes that connects to my mobile and enables the keypad, touch screen or accelerometer inside my mobile device act as an input mechanism.

In the future the content we create will be not be hosted in silos such as FaceBook and LinkedIn, our content will be hosted in the cloud and services will ask us for permission to interact with it in ways we currently can’t imagine. In the long term I’ll be able to go any website or service and see what information my friend added to it; this data will not be hosted on the website’s server however, but instead on my friend’s device and storage space which I have access to since I’m a trusted party. The era of hyper-personalized services begins when the old philosophy of putting data into a system to be aggregated and displayed in a useful fashion collapses and is replaced by the new human centric belief that systems have to ask for permission to interact with our data before presenting it in new and innovative ways that add value to our lives.

Scenario 1: I walk into a bar and bump into a friend of mine I haven’t seen in a while. I ask him for his contact information so we touch our NFC enabled devices for a split second and we’re now in each other’s address book. He not only gets my name and phone number, but a list of all the services I’m currently using and have set to public. All of this data generated via my publicly declared services is pulled down and aggregated onto his device and is listed under my entry in his address book, think of it as FaceBook’s Newsfeed, but open and 100% under my control. Later that night I decide I want to let him access my personal blog so I go into my device and grant him the ability to see my private blog entries. He doesn’t have to do anything since the list of services I use is in my contact card and when I manipulate permission settings they automatically update for the people who have me in their address book. My friends will always knows what I’m up to and I don’t have to tell him to check out a particular website to see my data, it is my data after all, the fact that I have it being displayed on service A versus service B does not and should not make a difference.

Scenario 2: I walk into a bar I regularly enjoy coming to with friends and sit down at a table. Since the bar is in my address book it knows I’m a trusted party, I tap my NFC enabled device to the corner of a display near me and a menu appears with meals and drinks based on my previous orders, not only that, I get to see recommendations and ratings my friends left the last time they were in here. This information isn’t hosted by the servers in the bar, instead the UI pulls data that my friends left for this particular establishment which is either hosted on their devices or in their storage clouds. I can read it because they’ve granted me permission. I use my mobile device as a remote control, the touch screen acts as a trackpad, to order a drink and pay for it. Around 10 seconds after I finish making that purchase the screen fades out and the basketball game with my favorite college team shows up, this is possible because my mobile device is smart enough to know my preferences for the type of media I like to consume and can communicate that information to the display.

What other scenarios can you imagine in the new hyper-connected world that will arise in the next few years that will hopefully put you, the individual, in the center of?