who’s twittering about fring today?
(Image from C.C. Chapman, original here. Used with permission)
See who’s twittering about fring? now thanks to Terraminds micro search, you can click here to see.
p.s. For a Youtube intro on how to add twitter to your fring see here.
fly fring? not for a while yet
It looks like the new Qantas Airbus A380s will be offering in-flight wifi (see here).
Presumably Qantas and other airlines will charge for the new service and no one is talking publicly about the fees yet. But a 2007 Information Week article (see here) at least gives us something to found our unfounded rumours on.
Still the idea of being able to fring your family and friends whilst filling in those 24 hour plus flights from Sydney to Europe sounds like a good idea to me. Even if it costs me. After all, it’s either that …or talk to the passenger next to you.
Prices for the Qantas service, which will be provided by OnAir, a joint venture between Airbus and SITA, the Geneva-based provider of telecommunications services for the commercial aviation industry, have not been announced. Last year, in a presentation to U.K. investors, OnAir CEO George Cooper said that his company had landed an unnamed customer for in-flight data services. “As well as in-flight GSM, their offering to passengers will comprise seatback instant messaging at a price of $5 for unlimited use throughout the flight,” Cooper added. “Web e-mail will cost $8 per flight, with attachments extra, and there will be a measure of Internet access. Laptop users would have Wi-Fi access to the Internet and VPNs.”
Those prices don’t sound too bad. So will we soon by happily making our fring calls from above the clouds? Probably not. Unfortunately.
Qantas has also not specified exactly how the “measure of Internet access” will be provided onboard airliners, but OnAir has previously said that in-flight data service will be based on satellite company Inmarsat’s SwiftBroadband 432Kbit/sec-per-channel service.”
“As Dan Warne, writing on the Australian technology Web site APCmag.com, points out, that would “equate to sub-dialup speeds per passenger unless the aircraft uses multiple satellite channels at once.”
We may have to use fring’s chat features instead! 
erasmus on blogging
(Image source here. Image from Lo Van den Berg, used with permission)
Here’s a quote from Erasmus written in 1522.
“…the life of those who like myself write books is no better than that of the actors of antiquity who presented a play on the stage before the public. They had to learn their parts, to rehearse their production, to do all that was humanly possible to satisfy their audience- that motley throng, truly a beast of many heads, few of whose members have the same tastes, nor are they always consistent, and, what is worse, the greater part of them are led by prejudice rather than judgment. On their thumbs the poor mountebank is wholly dependent; he must worship the lowest of the mob, and after superhuman exertions thinks himself happy if he has secured a hearing for his play. If he is hissed off the stage, he must find a tree and hang himself. Surely books have to face critics who are no less various, no less difficult to please, no less distorted by prejudice. In one way our fate is the more unfair, in that we put on our show at our own expense, while the actors get their fee. And they, if the dance is a failure, merely look foolish; we, if we fail to please, are heretics.”
I didn’t know Erasmus was a blogger!
from nokias to light sabres
The fring main blog has this great little report on “fring gravity control”
The demo is based on the Nokia N-95 and a neat add in application called “RotateMe”. There is a fascinating RotateMe video online here.
These apps use the N95’s built in accelerometer. News reports tell us that accelerometers are likely to be a common feature in mobile devices in the future.
Besides RotateMe there is a small but growing arsenal of N95 accelerometer enabled applications, including a pedometer to count your steps and (see Youtube video below) a light sabre sound effects game designed to amused your inner wookie.
More seriously, this plus the iPhone, are part of a push to find new more natural kinds of user interface for mobile computing and communications devices, which we hope, will eventually be as elegant as a real light sabre. MIT’s Technology Review last year reported on some other prospective applications for accelerometer equipped mobile devices.
A recent article in “The Economist” highlighted the problem.
“Consider the Nokia 6680 mobile phone, says Adam Greenfield, an expert in computing culture at New York University and the author of “Everyware”, a book about the future of computing. He found that 13 clicks were needed to change its ringtone. “It’s an interface designed by engineers for engineers,” he says. Steven Kyffin, a senior researcher at Philips, a consumer-electronics giant based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, concedes that computer programmers and engineers, himself included, are often guilty of designing complicated systems packed with too many features. “We’re compelled by complexity,” Mr Kyffin says. “There’s a point where humanity just can’t handle it.” Tellingly, the field of interface design even has an unwieldy name: it is known as “human-computer interaction”, or HCI.”
I love my Nokia 6680, but I think a light sabre would be even better.
vishing in troubled waters
First there was phishing, then there was pharming , now there is vishing . Think of vishing as voice e-mail and web type scams that come by phone. And it’s on the rise, so says the FBI.
In a sense phone scams of various kinds have been around ever since Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the first telephone. Unfortunately a negative side of the growth of VoIP technology has been to make it easier and cheaper for scammers to go international.
Users of VoIP services like Skype, SIP or fring are under no more threat from vishing than users of regular phone services. Indeed in some ways less, party because their VoIP service numbers are less well known than public phone numbers and secondly because VoIP users are more aware of new technology. Awareness of the vishing threat is the best defence. Forewarned is forearmed. Still the vishing threat is, for the time being, a growing one, and a threat that somewhat unfairly may harm the overall reputation of the VoIP technology and the legitimate VoIP industry generally.
This Youtube gives a good introduction to vishing.
For a shorter snappier introduction, go to the last segment of this Youtube, starting at 2 minutes, 30 seconds. The graphic of a typical vishing attack is quite good.
There are some specific hints on avoiding vishing here, but as mentioned above, the best defence is knowledge.
CDMA wins reprieve
Senator Stephen Conroy, the federal minister for communications, has announced (see here) that the planned closure of Australia’s CDMA mobile phone network has been postponed for three months. Originally scheduled to close down at the end of January, the CDMA network has been given another three months to live and won’t be closed until the end of April 2008.
For some analysis of this decision see ITWire here.
This Youtube provides some comparison of CDMA and GSM technologies. The video is quite good in contrasting the native capabilities of both CDMA and GSM but I think it overlooks two points. Firstly, CDMA has good distance capability which is one reason why it was initially attractive to telcos serving large low population density non-urban regions in Australia and Canada. To date it has mainly been rural customers in Australia who have pushed back against CDMA closure. Secondly, although the native GSM data capabilities are probably weaker than those under CDMA, GSM operators have been upgrading their data services with new services like EDGE and, more importantly, 3G .
recycling stalled
Here’s a follow up to our previous post about the “greening” of mobile phone technology .
Mobiles may be going green, but it seems customers aren’t. It looks like customers aren’t getting the message about recycling their old mobile phones. Here are some figures from the Telstra run “Now we are talking” blog site . I find the low recycle count amazing. Most phone shops in my local area have old phone disposal bins displayed prominently and even my local bank branch has one directly in front of it’s customer queue area.
- 42% of Australians keep their old mobile phones – even if they don’t work
- A further 18% give their old phone to a family member or friend
- 9% throw it away
- 4% recycle
Of course, giving an old phone to a friend is itself really a form of recycling so maybe the figures are better than they first seem, but what are people doing with all those dead phones?
stop thief! smile!
I’ve been using the free smartphone application Shozu for some time. It loads easily onto your cameraphone and it allows you to upload pictures directly to Flickr and other photo sharing sites, including blogs, directly from your phone without the need to sync to your PC. I mustn’t be the only person using it as there are, at least, a half million photos on Flickr tagged with the label “Shozu” . You can also use Shozu to provide an online backup for your phone’s contact data.
But here is an “application” I guess most users of this neat little service didn’t imagine. Security.
A friend of mine reports from London that a co-worker had his mobile phone stolen from the office. The victim happened to have Shozu on his cameraphone. Within a few days they were able to identify the phone thief from the new pictures that had started to turn up on the victim’s Flickr account. Obviously the thief was clicking “yes” to the Flickr upload request message that Shozu displays on the phone after each photo is taken. I had a similar experience last year when I lost my phone whilst working interstate. Luckily I remembered where I had been and was able to backtrack and recover my phone the next day. Still even that short absence wasn’t long enough to deter the finders from experimenting with the cameraphone and, inadvertently, Shozu. I’m not sure whether my London contact was able to use the Shozu Flickr images as evidence with the police or the courts, but this seems to be relatively common, unintended use for Shozu. At least according to Digg.
Will using cameraphone applications like this stop all thiefs? I don’t think so, but at least it may help catch a few stupid ones.
This Youtube gives a brief introduction to Shozu and the second one, a demo of how the latest version of Shozu works on a Nokia N-95.
mobiles go green
Vodaphone has introduced a software change in the way they run their mobile phone networks that could cut carbon dioxide emissions by a million tons per year. (See story here.) That’s at the network end, still a lot of power and resulting CO2 output is derived from phone chargers at the customer end.
There are a few companies working on alternatives, including new kinds of power strips (for example E-rope), audio alerts to advise users that their phone is charged , phone handsets made from up to 50% of renewable bio-materials and solar powered phone chargers. (See here and here ).
I’m surprised that solar phone chargers aren’t more commonly available here in Australia. We’ve got plenty of sun. Still my guess is that it will take a new generation of industry standards before major gains are seen, currently in the IT industry, new more energy efficient standards are becoming the norm in the data centre world (see here), so maybe the mobile phone industry will follow.
