In the emerging all-IP world of converged wireless networks, courtesy of IMS, it’s a cinch to add new services to the mix.
IMS allows services to be plugged in to the call pathway. In legacy networks that are circuit-switched, any processing of the audio pathway is usually a function of the switch, or some adjunct to […]

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Earlier, I mentioned Gataga, the “social exploration” engine. Go check it out, if you haven’t already.
In the post, I suggested that the mobile interface was inefficient. Now, I could have posted my feedback to Gataga, which ordinarily I would have done, but instead I just added the tag “Gataga” to my posting and waited….
….sure enough, […]

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In the world of massively complicated and expensive-to-run mobile operator networks, it is difficult to develop and deliver new services. An operator network, just like any other, is lots of computers and databases. These might be configured as switches, as text messaging centres (passing your message from your phone to another), as radio controllers, and […]

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Beware RIM! Despite being king of the mobile email world with Blackberry, your mobile email solution is going to be toppled soon unless you improve it.
Why?
Someone who understands email is going to come up with a better solution. RIM doesn’t understand email in the “information organisation” sense. They understand email in the transport sense, i.e. […]

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Gataga is a new search engine that searches items according to their tags (keywords), such as tagged URLs (e.g. del.icio.us) and tagged photos (e.g. flickr). It also includes RSS feeds on the tag searches, so you can keep an eye on your favourite search terms without having to go back to the engine each time.
Interestingly, […]

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The latest edition of New Scientist has an article about recent experiments with quantum mechanics. Theory suggests that with two “entangled particles” that are physically separate (could be opposite sides of The Universe), changing the state of one causes a change of state in the other.
Clever guys in Geneva have done experiments, now verified by […]

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In idea #62, I wanted to scrape info from a designed-for-big-screen web page and make it available for a tiny screen on a mobile, perhaps as a WAP page or a text message.
The example I gave was the “My Rental List” from the Blockbuster Online account page. It’s just three tiny lines of info (my […]

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Cameraphones, along with MMS and Push-to-view applications, enable us to connect with visual databases. Pattern detection and matching techniques can be used to identify image content.
One example already touted is facial recognition, using the face as a kind of visual URL. Point the camera at someone’s face and click straight into their website, or a […]

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I was in a discussion yesterday with a group of people talking about IMS, which is the latest addition to the 3G network. It doesn’t matter, for now, if you don’t know what an IMS is…
According to the IMS product guy in the group, it’s an “enabling technology”. According to the IP guys who were […]

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Do you “umm” a lot? If I play back a voicemail message before I deposit it (which I invariably do and probably shouldn’t), I notice how many times I say “umm”. Probably it increases during voicemail experiences. Afterall, talking out loud to a machine isn’t always easy, even for a geek.
Speech processing is advancing all […]

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HCI stands for Human Computer Interface (or Interaction), but should it stand for Human AND Computer Inclusion?
Modern lives tend to be based on two types of HCI:
Human-Company Interaction = social interaction with people.
Humming-Computer Interaction = sitting glued to a monitor.
(There’s another, which is Human Cathode-Ray Imbibing = television.)
Most of the time, there’s a sharp boundary […]

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It’s v. hot here in the UK. Summer has arrived at last. I even got sun burnt for the first time in years, whilst watching my kids in their golf lesson. Today was putting. Balls were going straight, even without nano-tech.
The weekend has been great for lazing around in the garden and reading a book […]

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I remember when I posted about the Blackberry on a business networking website. Someone replied - in complete seriousness - that they had a huge bush in their garden that produces lots of fruit.
Nonetheless, the name has been re-purposed in some circles. Mention the name Blackberry and people know that you actually mean a mobile […]

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This month’s Business 2.0 magazine has a great cover feature on “The New Instant Companies”. Here’s the intro…
“Savvy startups are tapping some of today’s most powerful trends - cheap software, offshore factories, the blogosphere - to go from concept to multimillion-dollar sales overnight. Here’s how you can too…”
Wow! Sounds impossible, but the stories are incredible, […]

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The recent (June/July) edition of IEE journal “Communications Engineer” awarded my book a maximum 5 stars. Here are some quotes:
“The author gradually builds the knowledge of the user, but always relates this back to the ‘big picture’. I suspect this volume will do much more than most to help dispel the fog surrounding wireless applications, […]

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