Category: technology

the flipping EU gets heavy with a dedicated website to help consumers find the best rates.

The site isn't going to win any design awards but it's a serious move by the EU to try and normalise the rates. A fundamental key to the EU's economic success is ease of movement for citizens, this is hampered by the extraordinarily high fees mobile operators currently hit us when out of our home turf.

I've been hammered by T-Mobile on many an occasion, no so much in the EU was when in Dubai. Outside of the EU they even charge you for missed calls redirected to voicemail – so even if your phone is off you pay (mine was dead due to a large wave splashing in and soaking the darn thing).

Whilst the EU's site is helpful it's tough as a consumer to balance things out: T-Mobile is the cheapest in the UK for my needs (Blackberry and any network minutes) but O2 is much cheaper in the EU. Hmmm…

I called Infonortics and it's true that the Virtual Communities conference has been cancelled for this year. It's an event I've been meaning to attend for years and something has always got in the way…

Still it's a bit surprising to read terms like 'old-skool' or 'over the hill' raised in relation to virtual or online communities. It's a terminology game you see… virtual communities = message boards & email groups. Social networking = blogging, buddy lists etc Some argue that the 'new' social networking tools are more user-centric and less discursive creating less room for true discussion. In some cases that's true but instant messaging can create wonderful hyperlinked spaces for intelligent discussion, just as much as web-based boards can also do so.

I think this is just silly jargon. Call human to human interaction online what you want but I figure that Skype, LinkedIn and co are all Online Communities. In fact I'd be more than happy to argue that social networking is a subset of Online Communities – which is why I'm sticking to being an online community consultant.

(via the local e-democracy national project blog )

My brother-in-law is an HGV driver. He's just come over to the UK to start working here and he doesn't really know his way around the rounds. He could manage with maps, he did around Eastern Europe, but he wants to make a good impression with his new employers.

So he went out and bought a TomTom GO 300, and who was I to stop him? Obviously I had to test it for him, just to make sure it worked, you know how it is.

I'm very very impressed. It's very, very easy to use; totally multi-lingual and utterly cool. The 3D view is perfect – the road you're on just sort of continues ahead onto the screen which shows your position at just the right angle. There's something very cool about cruising around a junction at night (there's a gentle night vision colour scheme, natch) watching your arrow zoom down the road – of course I was watching very carefully as I was driving (cough).

It's truly simple, just enter your destination postcode and you're off. If you get lost, which I tried intentionally a number of times, and the TomTom doesn't get flustered. It recalculates your route and just tells you to take the next appropriate turning – there are no demands to make immediate U-turns nor does the polite person inside give up in exasperation.

I love that it's so portable, easy to fit in the car and it shows where the nearest petrol stations are! I'm always looking for a pit stop with only fumes in my tank.

The TomTom can also be connected with a GPRS mobile for live traffic and weather info, I haven't tried that but it sounds good. You can also update and expand the the TomTom through its USB link, or through the SD card for storage. My brother-in-law wanted to load up a Polish voice on the TomTom so I dutily fired up my PowerBook. I wasn't expecting much joy, every other device like this has never worked with a Mac straight up – I've always had to find a hack or give up.

But lo and behold the little beauty worked like a dream, mounting on my Desktop like any other storage device. Wonderful.

Can honestly say that this gadget is very close to being perfect. Sure a bigger screen, longer battery life and all that would be nice. But really at this price point I couldn't expect anything more.

The incredibly positive reviews on Amazon are justified.

I'm at Cal Henderson's Building Flickr workshop, which is fantastic… I've met old friends from my time at Warwick University and two incredibly eager Estonians from Skype – the fact they were both wearing Skype t-shirts was a bit of a give-away.

They're so excited about Skype it's incredible… they showed me Skype Video in action and it's good. Not iChat AV good but still really neat and clear – I'm looking forward to it. One thing though, they won't say if the Mac will be supported, they only showed it to me running on Windows. We shall see… Interesting times for IM.

Today's tech news leaves me hopeful about VOIP, instant messaging and their ilk. This makes a nice change as I've been increasingly frustrated by trying to get all the different things working together.

I use Adium which is really very good, better than Proteus which I used previously. Adium is more stable, less of a resource hog and easier to configure. Still it does choke on MSN group chats and of course doesn't support all the voice or video chat of goodness of iChat nor the world of Skype.

iChat is 'sweet' in that Apple-good way but I just have had no joy in getting anything more than audio chat with a fellow Mac-toting iChat user. With my father-in-law using WindowsXP and AOL's AIM I've had no audio or video joy despite my shelling out for a decent Logitech camera.

Skype also is great for what it is, cross-platform, quality voice chat. I find the software a bit clunky and the user lookup patchy. But it does work and dialling out is cheap and fairly good. Still only some people have Skype and no other software can work with Skype's encrypted P2P protocol.

So I face having Adium, iChat and Skype open to make the most of all my contacts and communication options – eugh – I hate all those open windows, especially when Skype on the Mac is such a monster.

So it's intriguing and positive to hear that Google's new Google Talk messaging/VOIP system is built with open standards from Jabber. I'm so happy to see Jabber technology being widely used – it's about time… And Google are really serious about this, they happily show all the clients that will work with their network. No arms races to crack the protocol as we see for MSN.

Call it coincidence but on the same day Skype announced (but didn't release) SkypeWeb and SkypeNet API which promise to finally open the Skype walled garden to the web and other applications.

It's looking good – how or will Yahoo, MSN and AOL respond?

For the last few weeks I've been living in Basecamp, the web-based project management system that has been a bit of a hit in the new media world. Some thoughts…

Using a web-system I do miss the speed and richness of a desktop application, no matter how much Ajax goodness they throw in. But they more than make up for it with the benefits – access to the project info from anywhere and good communication.

Once I get my clients over the initial hump of their desire to shoot off emails left, right and centre we start to see the real benefits. Basecamp allows everyone to see what is going on. It also provides live, searchable documentation as problems are solved and reported. That's saved my bacon numerous times already.

Good-bye email attachment version hell – say hello to online file sharing with Basecamp's file tab. The todo lists, milestones and messaging are all godsends. It does take discipline though, you need to write copiously on the system to keep the value there. You also need to think carefully about who to include on threads. But it really really pays off.

Two things I'm learning:

• Transcribing phone calls and f2f meeting notes, in summary, onto Basecamp is valuable but takes a lot of time and discipline. If you don't do it you end up with big gaps in how things are progressing.

• Instant messaging is the black sheep in working on Basecamp. There's really no connection between the two. Copying and pasting your chat history doesn't look right (too many typos, smileys etc). So I end up reviewing my history and posting todo items etc as needed. I don't know what I want exactly, I just know I want Basecamp to do more with my IM. Anybody?

So for the moment I feel like my life is a Basecamp todo list. Which is hard work but in a good way – my energy is going into doing stuff and less into sorting out who said what when in which email. Hurrah.

Those who know me well will be aware that I am rather passionate about Macs. I have the fervour of a convert bemoaning the pain and energy wasted over years of Windows and OS/2 use.

So I won't deny I responded to yesterday's announcement with befuddled shock… RISC is better, I muttered; what about AltiVec's speed enhancements, I wondered and so on. How could this be happening???

But it really does make sense for Apple from performance, cost and future growth perspectives. Graphics cards etc. will be cheaper – no special Mac editions I reckon, and with IBM distracted by Xbox et al I can't see Apple getting what they want from the Big Blue. As I type on my 1Ghz PowerBook, now the slowest machine in the Kitcat household thanks to 2 new Mac Minis, I know that a G5 PowerBook won't happen. So what? I didn't care about the Motorola chip in my first Mac and I won't care about the Pentium in my next PowerBook, Macs work and Jobs know that's why people buy.

Strategically PowerBooks (and other low power devices) is the main reason behind this switch and TidBits had the choice quote to explain it all:

Citing each company's processor roadmaps beyond 2006, Jobs said that the PowerPC provides 15 “units of performance” per watt, while Intel's processors will be able to offer 70 units per watt.

Wow that's a big difference.

'Nuff said. Coming next, some Long Tail of e-Democracy thoughts…

Some business colleagues recommended that I pop into the Gizmondo flagship store on Regents Street, London. Some had felt they had seen the future in the little device.

I didn’t.

The sales pitch didn’t go well. Firstly the demonstration device’s battery failed after about 2 minutes. It seemed that I couldn’t use it while charging as they found me another. Apparently with constant use the battery lasts 3 hours, not very appealing.

I’m no games player, certainly not when on the move – I sold my GameBoy when I was 16. So, accepting that games were a major part of their pitch, I asked what else it could do. Well apparently a Gizmondo ‘sounds better’ than an iPod, though it only comes with 32Mb as standard. I don’t care if something sounds better than my iPod, mine sounds good enough to me. I’m also not convinced by this removable media malarkey. Didn’t the iPod show that even down at the Shuffle size people prefer long-battery life and fat capacity as opposed to loads of expensive, fiddly little cards? Didn’t MiniDiscs also show the same kind of trend previously?

Moving on, I tried to use the Internet access on the bright little colour screen. Unfortunately it’s a walled garden at the moment, you can only access sites approved by Vodafone and not enter the URL of choice. What a waste of time. The camera sucked and I couldn’t get the much vaunted GPS to work. All this with a Gizmondo lady helping me out.

Usability was terrible. Typing emails or SMS messages consisted of using the joypad to flick around a tiny software keyboard. Hellish. The controls are essentially a Nintendo gamepad with a few miniscule shortcut keys for power, volume etc. How one dials numbers or does anything remotely useful other than shoot aliens is beyond me. Perhaps one gets so frustrated with trying to dial that one resorts to shooting aliens…

I also find the lack of WiFi astonishing. Kids (ie game players) are cost conscious people – slurping down free bandwidth is a must. Perhaps nervous 3G providers are tightening the thumb-screws on handset designers to prevent revenue leaking out through big fat WiFi pipes. I hope not.

Gizmondo (a Windows-based gadget, £129 starting price) is going to get squashed horribly under Sony, Apple, Nokia, Nintendo, Blackberry… you get the picture. I’m sticking with my Blackberry.

At last (actually it didn't take long at all) we have Google Maps UK and Google Local UK. We also have Google SMS. They all work rather nicely… fun!

When I spent all of my time at university pestering my mate Paul about how brill Macs were I had absolutely no idea it would drive him to this….