happy birthday to the transistor

“IN DECEMBER 1947, Bells Labs scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain first revealed what would come to be known as the transistor.They held the future in their hands - a device that would replace vacuum tubes in 10 years, and 60 years later has transformed electronics.Inventions change things; great inventions change everything. That first device was the size of a modern mobile phone…”

In case you want to organise your own celebrations, you could either celebrate next month or maybe wait until next year. After Bell Labs first invented the transistor, they kept it under wraps until June 1948. (See here for some history). Either way the transistor will soon have it’s 60th birthday. Melbourne’s The Age has an excellent commemorative article here. And PBS has a great historical site here.

How many transistors do you own? The answer is actually a little overwhelming. I wouldn’t be buying each one of them a present!

the envelope please…

fring has been nominated for The Sony Ericsson Content Awards 2007 . One of five nominees under the productive mobility category this is quite an honour for fring. All of the contestants have excellent products. There are a few there I will be checking out over the next few days.

The awards website is an excellent flash based site in itself and the nominees are all on display. For more details, visit the The Sony Ericsson Content Awards 2007 site itself or check out the news items on the fring main blog or the news item on the All About Symbian site.

This is the first time the awards have been granted and the finalists will be announced at a ceremony the week before Xmas, 18th December 2007.

Interestingly enough, it was in the week between the 17th and the 23rd December 1947, sixty years ago, that the first transistor was invented. So the award date seems to commemorate an appropriate milestone.

broadband comparisons international

The IT and business press usually has all sorts of stories about which country has better broadband. And we’ve all heard stories about better service somewhere else. Well this recently issued report from WebOptimization.Com seems quite comprehensive. And surprise, surprise Australia’s broadband infrastructure and performance compares well internationally under most category headings. Still we’d all like faster and cheaper. Will this win many office arguments? Probably not.

fringME! on my Nokia E-51

You may have noticed a few fring announcements about our great new fringME! widget. The current version of the fringME! widget allows fringsters with smartphones operating under the Symbian 9.1 and 9.2 operating systems to post a HTML widget to their websites that enables site visitors to contact them via fring text chat services or to (optionally) view their current location via GoogleMaps.

Well a new addition to the Nokia E-series line, and a member of the Symbian 9.1 operating system family is the Nokia E-51. The E-51 sports some great features which include these (as described by the Symbian site):

• Thin design loaded with features to help balance your business and leisure time
• Access your email while on the go with support for most leading corporate and personal email applications
• Browse the web and email with high speed 3G, HSDPA, or WLAN connection
• Make lower cost voice calls over the internet with the built-in WLAN
• Stay connected to the people and information you need with a long battery life and large internal memory

The following review, from episode 47 of the video podcast “The Smartphone Show” gives an overview of the product.

In addition to all these cool features, the Nokia E-51 is also the latest addition to the fring family. You can download the fring software to it and use it to fring your friends via your mobile phone carrier’s data network or via Wi-Fi! So happy fringing E-51 owners!

But, there’s more…

Just a word to Australian readers. If you check the Nokia Australia website you won’t find the E-51 listed. This doesn’t mean that unlisted Nokia models are unavailable in Australian stores. But you need to be careful with unlisted models. You may experience problems with warranties and product guarantees if the phone has not been officially released into the Australian market. I would recommend quizzing your retailer and double checking with Nokia before purhasing an unlisted model. Sometimes small retailers import them from other markets and Nokia does not recognise or provide warranty support for those handsets. I rang Nokia and received verbal advice that the Nokia E-51 would be officially released in Australia, even though as yet it is not listed on their website.

find me with fringME! - googleMaps meet fringME!

In a recent blog post we mentioned that fring’s new fringME! widgets will allow fringsters with smartphones running under the Symbian 9.1 and Symbian 9.2 operating systems (…you can check your Symbian phone’s OS here) to use the new fringME! widget on their blogs, websites and HTML e-mail to initiate fring enabled text chat contact between their web site and mobile phone.

Well, that’s not all. As you can read here there has been some great news from fring on the geotagging / geolocation front.

For Symbian 9.1 and 9.2 GPS equipped phones, the fringME! widget can also be used to provide your phone’s current location via a GoogleMaps interface.

This is, of course, be an opt in service, so you won’t be providing your current location unless you want to. And you can turn it on or off from your handset’s fring controls. Privacy or transparency. It’s at your fingertips.

Until recently operating a GPS tracking system was both costly and complex, now thanks to fring and fringME!, for the supported phones, it’s fringing easy.

Keep coming back for more news from fring.

congratulations flickr

Flickr.com is certainly a flagship of the Web 2.0 world. Like fring, Flickr has been enpowering regular people with the new web technologies. Anyhow Flickr has just had it’s 2 billionth digital photograph uploaded. And the image was taken here in Australia, near Sydney’s Haymarket district Chinatown.

The image is actually of a dead tree trunk sculpture called the Golden Water Mouth (open this image with the All Sizes tag to read the inscription) . Golden Water Mouth is said to bring good luck to Sydney’s Chinese community. Certainly the two billionth image represents good luck to Flickr.

Flickr, founded in Feb. 2004, reached it’s first billion images earlier this year and took only three months to reach the second billion.

fringME! - text me with the new fring widget

fring is about to launch it’s own widget!

The fringME widgets will allows those fringsters lucky enough to have Symbian 9.1 and 9.2 operating system smartphones to link their on-line web ‘presence’ to their mobile cell phone. It’s an applet you can post to your web site or blog that allows your site visitors to contact you via fring’s chat capabilities. (Depending on your e-mail setup, it may even be possible to use fringME widgets as part of your signature block, at least in some HTML based e-mail systems.)

Two versions of the fringME widget will soon be released.

The other version looks like this…

For those fringsters who don’t commit their smartphone technical specifications to memory (…what!! you don’t?) , and who aren’t sure what Symbian OS drives their handset, you can always check out the useful ready reference guide provided by the Symbian team here.

And remember, this is just the first generation of fringME widgets, extra capabilities and services will become available through the fringME widgets in the future. So stay tuned for more fring …and fringME… news.

STOP PRESS! UPDATE!

The fringME! widget has now been released. For more information please check out Alon’s fring blog post here.

MVOIP news from Macao and beyond

David Firth, writing in “The Australian” (20 Nov 2007) , in their weekly IT supplement, has some interesting discussion on the new Hutchison Skype phones and the it-will-get-here-eventually Apple iPhone. David’s article “Cheaper WiFi and net call options multiply” has some great discussion relevant to MVOIP watchers generally.

David says the Hutchison’s Skypephones won’t permit SkypeIn or SkypeOut services. Elsewhere in MVOIP land, Nokia, promoting it’s N series WiFi enabled handsets has been working with Melbourne-based WiFi hotspot developer Azure Networks. Azure Networks itself has recently been acquired by Maginet, which is a “leading technology provider in the Australian hospitality market” (source, PDF).

Last but not least, David says “Telstra boss, Sol Trujillo, in Macao for an Asian mobile conference, has been telling international reporters he wants exclusive rights to market Apple’s iPhone in Australia when it’s released sometime next year.”

It looks like 2008 could be the year of MVOIP in the Australian marketplace. For the average user or potential user, usability, flexibility and portability beyond implementations that fence users into fixed plans would seem to be sensible advice.

two milestones

According to John Quiggin, a well known Australian politics and economics commentator, and a professor at the University of Queensland, thanks to recent international exchange rate shifts, the Australian per capita GDP now exceeds that of the US. See Quiggin’s article here. But he warns against breaking out the champagne, those are market exchange rate figures not purchasing power estimates.

On the other side of the globe, another milestone may have been reached too…

According to Hitwise, a leading online marketing intelligence site, we may just have passed an important milestone in the life of the web.

“For the fist time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services…”

So reports Hitwise blogger Robin Goad here.

“This confirms that social networks are starting to eat into the web-based email providers’ dominance of the internet messaging market. A growing proportion of the UK online population is choosing to communicate with friends via social networks rather than email…”

There may be a digital generation gap too!

“It’s interesting to see that age clearly plays a role, with younger Internet users preferring social networks, while older surfers choose email…”

The same trend Hitwise detected in the UK is gathering force in Australia too. At least , according to this report from Stuff.co.nz.

“…the percentage of internet traffic going to social networking and chat websites in Australia has increased by over 37 per cent during the first half of 2007…The biggest mover has been Facebook, which at its current rate of growth, may pass MySpace, in terms of web traffic, early next year. “

“…Facebook’s own statistics reveal, one and a half million Australians visited the website in August 2007, sitting fourth user behind the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom…”

phone alone?

Time magazine, in it’s current south pacific edition, features the i-Phone on the cover and as it’s nominee for the Best Invention of 2007.

Time nominated five reasons the i-Phone won.

• The iPhone is pretty.
• It’s touchy-feely.
• It will make other phones better.
• It’s not a phone, it’s a platform.
• It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come.

(I think I even qualify under a couple of those points!!! - Tim)

Those of us old enough to remember 2006 will recall that Youtube won the Time invention of the year last year. In 2005 a cloned Afghan hound dog named “snuppy” was crowned “Time invention of the year” before becoming embroiled in a scientific fraud controversy from which snuppy eventually emerged unscathed. In 2004 the award went to Burt Rutan’s SpaceShip One, a reusable spaceplane, then mooted to go into regular commercial service by 2007. In 2003 the award went to Apple for the i-tunes music store. So the i-Phone is the second Apple win in four years.