How to save money and stay connected anywhere on earth

Summary:
Travel much? Here's the quick list of what's worth grabbing:
- BlackBerry 9700 (UMA means free WiFi calling internationally, 3G means it works anywhere on earth)
- iPhone 3GS (awesome browser and maps makes life easy. Skype is also pretty handy. Make sure you unlock it.)
- A Boingo account ($10/month to use lots of WiFi hotspots abroad)
- A Google Voice account (call forwarding, voicemail transcription)
- Gizmo account (call-forward from your Google Voice account to your local prepaid number seamlessly)
- Kindle (with international wireless, you're always getting the news and books you want... it's awesome)

Here're a little more detail:
I just got back from a 3 week trip to Japan and Thailand, and I didn't want to be TOTALLY disconnected, so figuring out how to stay in touch, and not pay $3/minute to AT&T or T-Mobile for roaming was high on my list. Here's what I did and how it worked out for me:

First up, my BlackBerry Bold 9700 on T-Mobile. On T-Mobile you can get a $20/month add-on that includes all the international eMail use you can imagine, which is a great way to control costs. Also, unlike AT&T, T-Mobile has enabled WiFi calling (aka UMA), which allows your phone to use voice and data service over WiFi just as if you were home... meaning, for free.

Next up, the iPhone 3GS. AT&T's data plans are pretty terrible for roaming, but there's no shortage of ways to unlock an iPhone, thankfully. Between a local SIM card, with data services, ($30/month for 3G and unlimited data on TrueMove in Thailand, for example) and GPS, the iPhone becomes an amazing travel guide. Maps, search, Skype, etc. all make navigating a foreign city a whole lot easier.

Whether or not you're taking a laptop on your trip is a big question by itself. In my case, we planned this trip as we went, and since that meant lots of research and online bookings we brought the Mac. One cool thing was that as soon as I got to a hotel room, I plugged my Mac in by ethernet, and used Mac OS X's "Internet Sharing" feature to turn my laptop into a WiFi access point. As soon as I did this, my iPhone and BlackBerry both became totally free to use. Love this.

Speaking of WiFi, it's still expensive to get WiFi in lots of places, from hotels to airports. Unless, of course, you've got a Boingo account. For $10/month, you can get unlimited WiFi access at hotspots all over the world. I've used it in hotels, airports, and cafe's all over the world. It pays for itself the first time you use it.

Voicemail is another of the tricky ways carriers get roaming fees on your bill. Say someone calls you when you're on vacation, and you ignore the call. Well, your phone *forwards* the call back to your home country so it can go to voicemail. Guess who pays for that? So, how to fix this? Well, call your carrier and tell them to turn voicemail *off* on your phone. Then go ahead and get a Google Voice account, and give everyone THAT number instead of your cellphone's number. If people call or text you, you'll still get the call/message on your phone. But if you ignore the call, Google Voice handles the voicemail bit. No forwarding. No roaming charge. You also happen to get email transcription, and a web interface for free... which is really cool.

Want to get a bit more nerdy? Setup a Gizmo VoIP account, and set Google Voice to also forward your calls to your Gizmo number. So when someone calls you, your phone will ring, and if your computer's running, your Gizmo client will also "ring". More interestingly, you can tell Gizmo to forward your calls to your new local prepaid number (the SIM card that's now hopefully in your unlocked iPhone). What's happening here, again? Well, when someone calls your Google Voice number, it'll get forwarded to Gizmo, which will then forward the call to your new local number. What's cool is just how cheap this is. Gizmo, for example, charges 3-cents per minute to forward a call to Thailand. So, when someone in the US called me, I paid 3-cents per minute to receive the call by using Gizmo and a local network provider. AT&T would have charged me $1.99 per minute instead. Yup, AT&T is 66-times more expensive. This is a great way to save some money when roaming.

Finally, get a Kindle. Besides being way easier to carry than a bunch of books, the international wireless feature is fantastic. I was sitting on a beach in rural Thailand (on an island with no paved roads) reading Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Work Week. At some point he mentioned another book that sounded pretty interesting, and I was able to find, buy, and download the other book in less than a minute, without leaving my pina colada. Oh, and while I wasn't likely to get my weekly Economist magazine on an island that doesn't have an ATM or a bookstore, every Friday morning the Kindle received that week's issue electronically.

Other nice things to have around:
- Zagat to Go, the iPhone app from Zagat, has a great list of hotels, restaurants, and cafe's that you can use all over the world. A recent update of the app lets you store these lists right on the iPhone itself. So there's none of the slowness, flakiness, or costs of roaming to deal with.

- TripIt is fantastic. Handles reservations from all sorts of travel services, and neatly organizes them into an easy-to-check itinerary right on your device. Ever need to look for your boarding pass to find your flight number when you're filling out a customs declaration card? TripIt has all the info you need right there. Hope your flight's delayed so you can sleep a few more minutes? TripIt tells you what your flight's status is. Have a connecting flight? Shortly after you land, you'll get an eMail telling you whether your next flight is on time, where it is, and how long you have to make your connection. Really well executed.

-Skype on iPhone is a great app to have around, especially when making lots of calls. Often-times, I was on the BlackBerry and my wife was on the iPhone. With Skype on the iPhone, we still didn't pay for roaming.

What didn't work so well?
- CityMaps2Go is a great idea: Opensource map data from lots of big cities all over the world, all downloaded right to your iPhone, so you can look at maps without needing a data connection... meaning, you don't need to pay for roaming to use the maps. On paper it's a great idea, but in practise, the maps just aren't good enough. Wandering around Tokyo, it was apparent that I was better off paying AT&T for roaming than trying to use CityMaps2Go. As the open-sourced maps get better and more complete, this will be a great way to reduce roaming costs while traveling in future.

- WorldMate. It's like TripIt's under-achieving little brother. Had all sorts of issues with imporing itineraries, and has an interface that seems really powerful, and just ends up being confusing. Also, it appears to have the amazing ability to let you find and book flights right on your phone. In practise, it was too painful, and I ended up using my laptop every time. It feels like they've tried to do too many things, and haven't done many well.

Apple & AT&T allow VoIP? Yawn.

At last, Apple seems to be allowing iPhone VoIP apps to use the 3G network... first with Fring and iCall, and soon with Skype and other apps.

The blogosphere is buzzing, especially with news that iPad owners will be able to use their $30/month unlimited data packages for VoIP as well... which is cool, except that it doesn't matter.

First off, are we really willing to trust AT&T's 3G network to deliver solid quality for voice? Nope. What about WiFi? Trying to make a WiFi call in your average Starbucks doesn't often end well. Lots of dropped audio, and generally poor quality.

Sure, that's acceptable when it's a free alternative to a paid phone call, but what about when all calls are free anyway?

With all the major carriers offering unlimited voice and data plans from $80-120 USD / month, it's clear that unlimited voice is something that the carriers are already thinking about pretty seriously... and it's not just because they're feeling generous. It turns out the average call to customer service costs a carrier between $10-15. The average customer calls in 4-6 times a year. That's a lot of profit gone each time you call to complain about a dropped call, or an incorrect bill. With an unlimited plan, there aren't any errors on your bill, so you don't call customer service, and with domestic calls costing next to nothing for the carrier, this is a great way to cut costs and grow revenue.

What about carriers building out their 3G networks and adding more capacity? That's great, but the quality of service required to deliver solid voice just isn't a part of the 3G data service that carriers offer... and there's no incentive for them to provide it. (We asked for net neutrality... and we'll get it... meaning, no voice QoS).

My bet? Unlimited voice and data plans will take off in a big way in 2010, and between the decreasing price of voice minutes, and our increasing use of data applications (which, without QoS for voice, means voice-over-3G-data won't work), VoIP over 3G won't get used very much at all. The biggest threat to carrier voice revenue isn't VoIP-over-3G offerings... it's services like Google Voice, which are benefitted by the unlimited voice plans, but compete on the long-distance minute side of the business.

Advancing Android

Ah, so Nexus One is on the horizon... the true "Google Phone", and there's a lot of people checking their Verizon receipts (and the return policy) to see if they've bought their Droid in the last 30 days or not.

Rumors abound about Google shipping this as an unlocked and unsubsidised GSM handset, and people seem to be wondering just what this might mean...

A few thoughts:

• So far, no Android device has been on par physically with the iPhone. Whether it was industrial design, processor speed or otherwise, the iPhone still feels like it's in a league of it's own. This handset gives Google the chance to remove hardware as a reason to buy an iPhone instead.

• Unlocked? Hmm... If there's no carrier burden, this can truly become a first class data device... These are devices that really are all about TCP/IP, and just happen to use whatever network is around to get a connection, whether it's cellular, WiFi, or something else... Suddenly, carrier networks, roaming agreements, and fancy technologies like UMA become a lot less interesting... it can really just be all about data, and whoever is able to provide you the right quality of data service, at the right time, at the right price. Changing the game like this isn't dissimilar from Google's participation in the last US spectrum auction.

• What does this say to all the OEM's like Motorola who are making large strategic shifts to embrace Android? Is Google competing with their partners? No. The Android ecosystem needs a true iPhone-class flagship device, and by providing one, Google makes things better for all the participants in the ecosystem. While HTC seems to be the OEM building this particular device, I wouldn't be surprised if Google quite freely shares most or all of the design for this device with other OEM's. Building a minimum-spec phone that's competitive with iPhone, and helping the other ecosystem OEM's get to the same point helps developers and customers: less fragmentation, better user experience. While Motorola and others might suffer some near-term drop in device sales, in the long run this is going to be beneficial for the ecosystem.

• Where's the money? Is this thing going to ship above the $500 mark like all other unlocked smartphones? Building a new flagship phone that you want traction around, and then pricing it way outside even where early-adopters typically tread doesn't sound like a great way to spread the word. So, either there will be a carrier channel here that'll subsidise it (T-Mobile seems like a good option, given the device's reported 3G frequencies), or Google's going to eat some of the cost. Google could well decide that getting a solid competitor to iPhone well entrenched is worth some subsidy cost,of course... just write a cheque out of the promotional budget... But I think it's more interesting to try and understand just what the combined search and app market revenue looks like per device. If Google can sell a device at a price competitive with subsidised phones, and make up the difference with ads and apps, that's one hell of an endorsement of the platform, and the mobile ecosystem as a whole... and it's signals a huge change in how devices will be sold and subsidised in the next few years.

All in all, it promises to be an interesting Q1 for Android, and the smartphone ecosystem as a whole.

What Droid/Android needs

So, I've been playing with a Verizon/Motorola Droid for a few weeks now? It's great, but it's just not ready for prime-time... especially not as the flagship device for the Android platform. So what's wrong with Droid, and what does it need?

Better Hardware

1. Motorola have managed to build a device with a physical keyboard that's worse than iPhone's virtual keyboard. A tremendous engineering achievement.
2. 2 years after the iPhone's launch, shipping a touch screen without multitouch (and at this price, on a flagship device, positioned against iPhone) is just silly
3. The lack of a decent oil-resistant coating on the screen means lots and lots of wiping the display against your jeans
4. While I'm sure I'd be able to beat any poor mugger senseless with this brick of a phone, a little elegance in design wouldn't be the worst thing

Some OS suggestions

Android still crashes once every day or so... probably because of third party apps, but it's still crummy. Managing third party apps, and preventing them from taking down my phone would be a great OS addition

Multitasking
Background processing is nice, in theory, but in practice the whole thing feels slow and cumbersome, especially compared to the iPhone. I'd suggest a sort of multi-tiered background processing option:

1. The app just runs in the background without any modification, but is EXTREMELY CPU, network and memory limited versus other apps, especially when the user is actively interacting with the phone.
2. The app runs in an "approved" background state, where it's got a sort of QoS guarantee... something like "we'll let you run at full CPU for 5 seconds out of every 60 or 120 or whatever", so the app gets more resources, but only if it's designed to play nice
3. The app gets to run in the background, with full resources, but the user gets a VERY clear warning about what this might do to performance/responsiveness of the phone, etc.

Push with Payload
So, the other thing that helps some of this along is the ability to give developers the ability to push notifications AND payload data right to their app. Integrate this with some sort of "stored procedure" and you've got a great way to keep "background" apps from breaking the user experience.

Imagine an eMail, IM or stock portfolio app for a minute. The server would push updates (like messages, stock updates, etc.) to the phone, and the OS would take the message's payload, hand it over to a "push procedure" method and say "okay, you have 5 seconds... do what you need with this message". The stored "push procedure" could then stick the message in the app's DB, do some basic parsing, notify the user, etc. But the point is that the app can do all of this while the device is still in the user's pocket... and not suck up cycles when the user's got the phone out of their pocket and want to actually USE the app that might have pending content.

Add push w/ payload to an intelligent background processing mechanism, and suddenly you've got a MUCH more responsive and power-efficient platform. Which translates to a better user experience. Which means closing some of the gap with iPhone, without giving up multitasking.

Some Market Rules
Okay, so the Apple App Store has all sorts of restrictions that drive developers crazy... including the approval process. But they've also got some things right. For example, to put an app in the App Store, you MUST provide screenshots. Android market? Not so. On the App Store, you need to provide an "update summary" to explain to a user what changes you've made in an update that they are able to see before updating the app. Android market? Nope.

So, while some of Apple's decisions don't make developers all that happy, they seem to at least try to get things right for users... and happy users mean more app downloads, which means happy developers. Google ought to take a page out of the App Store book, at least where user experience is concerned.

So

My Droid's going back to Verizon any day now, but I'm sure I'll be picking up another Android device in the near future... and I'll cross my fingers I get some of my holiday feature-wishlist by then :)

BlackBerry's trying to catch up, instead of striving to lead

At this week's developer conference in San Francisco, RIM released a slew of exciting new features for the BlackBerry platform: OpenGL ES for games, push messaging to developers, Flash support, and some cool APIs around payments and reverse geocoding.

With BlackBerry competing against iPhone, Android, and Palm, which of these new announcements was an industry first by RIM? Reverse geocoding. Yikes.

Even Apple beat RIM to delivering broadly-available push messaging to delivers. Yes, Apple beat RIM... at push.

Oh, and Apple and Google have both had OpenGL ES since they launched... and, with the App Store, Apple's got payments in the bag.

So, where's RIM sitting then?

- No material improvements to the user experience.

- Despite having bought a WebKit browser company, still no decent browser.

- Despite acquiring Dash Navigation, they aren't close to competing with Android's Google Maps implementation (though, to be fair, *nobody* is).

- Their developer tools are still a far cry from the polished Apple Xcode tools.

On top of all of this, RIM continues to shoehorn new technologies into a dated Java-based OS, while all their competitors are on BSD or Linux. (To be fair, I'll bet the next major BlackBerry OS rev will include a Linux kernel.)

The scary part of this is that RIM's gone from being the market leader and innovator, to continuously playing catchup with the other players in the space. That Apple, Palm, and Google have all built more flexible operating systems, better browsers, and solid multimedia capabilities in the last 2 years, while RIM has struggled to release Storm and Storm 2 is telling.

With Android expected to hit prodigious volumes in the next 2 years, and the growing number of one-way BlackBerry-to-iPhone converts, the BlackBerry platform looks less and less exciting for developers. At a time when each of the major mobile platforms is "good enough" for day to day eMail, SMS and voice, the differentiator is really the app stack and the browser. With RIM falling down on both counts, it really seems like there's less and less upside for developers to focus on BlackBerry, when they could instead be working on their iPhone and Android apps.

So, what's next for RIM?

RIM started out in mobile eMail by building the entire stack themselves, because Palm refused to buy their wireless modem. That's right, Palm could've owned mobile eMail, but RIM ended up building it themselves. They followed a Palm-like strategy of finding exactly the right set of problems to solve, and made the BlackBerry terrific at solving them (talk about a Lean Startup). The problem is that RIM seems to be competing as though the axis' of competition haven't changed: they're still the best at eMail.

But the axis has changed... now it's about the "computer-in-my-pocket"... the web matters, and so do apps. Almost, perhaps, more than eMail.

It seems RIM's next step needs to be a re-invention...
- A new, modern OS
- A browser at parity with everyone else
- Developer tools that are as slick as Apple's

Most of all, all those brilliant folks in Waterloo and Redwood City need to figure out where (besides eMail) RIM's truly going to lead... playing catch-up doesn't appear to be a winning strategy for the company.

It's curious that Palm needed a similar technology/platform/business reinvention, and while Palm's made the leap, it's unclear whether they did it soon enough or not. Will RIM?

Slow Crab Festival 2008 - Disappointing

I went to this year's Slow Crab festival in San Francisco, held by the Slow Food folks, and while expectations were high... for a $100/plate at the "VIP table", it was pretty disappointing.

- pre-dinner appetizers were a few crackers and cheese, quickly finished within a few minutes of the doors opening. Massively poor planning here.

- They had one white, one red, one sparkling wine, and one beer. Nice. So much for lots of interesting local selection.

- Oh, and they started to run out of every wine they had before the dinner had even started. More great planning.

- The meal? Some basic, not-so-yummy salad... and then crab with butter and lemon on the side. Not so interesting unless all you wanted to do was eat pounds of crab dipped in butter/lemon.

- Desert? Run for the coffee and biscotti at the other side of the room as quick as you can if you want some...

- Speakers? Some were interesting... then there were the angry "rebel without a clue" fisherman talking nonsensically about threatening the Governator (Gov. Schwarzenegger)...

All in all? Not expecting to go to 2009, or perhaps another of the smaller Slow Food events. Shame... it sounded a lot more promising.

Silent trains?

The Economist has a brief article about train operator C2C in London offering mobile-free phones by coating the phones in an RF-absorptive material. Basically it prevents cellular signals from getting into or out of a train car, and by doing so guarantees silence in the cab.

It's a little heavy-handed for a few reasons, though. Firstly, blocking RF transmission will just put phones into a wildly-seeking-signal state, meaning that many people will end their journeys into London or on their way home with batteries that have been drained more than they ought to. Also, it prevents people from using otherwise silent data services (eMail, SMS, web, etc.).

What might be a better solution? Well, yes, coat the trains such that they don't let phones connect to external base-stations. Then go ahead an put in picocells inside the train cars themselves, or repeater-like technology that Orange and Virgin have already deployed. Allow these systems to only allow services to work on the data channel, and you're done...

And the revenue model? Whoever owns these picocells can charge the operators for allowing their customers to use them. Not an unreasonable "roaming" charge, of course, but something akin to the charge operators charge for terminating calls on their networks, perhaps.

And what's next? Deploy this in the tube. In fact, wouldn't this be a great project for TfL to own, both on commuter rail and in the tube?

Is RIM falling further behind?

A couple of days ago RIM released a software update to the new Bold. It turns out that the software stack on this device has been the cause of a lot of issues for RIM and it's partners: Some operators (like AT&T) have refused to ship the device with the previous software offering, and others have halted sales of the device until the fixes were ready. All in all a pretty miserable device launch for RIM (especially for a new flagship product).

Because RIM's got access to all of their devices on the network, I happened to get a notice on my BlackBerry telling me that there was an update available, and that I could get it by visiting a certain website. When I got there, I found that (unsurprisingly) I had to download a 93 MB file, launch Windows on my machine (sigh), and go through the update process.



Notwithstanding that having to use only a Windows PC to update my BlackBerry is pretty obnoxious, the entire upgrade process was far from uneventful. See, what happens is that the installer does a backup of your device, wipes it, reloads the new operating system, and then your old data.

Well, mine got half-way through the reloading phase and freaked out. So, I momentarily had a shiny brick instead of a BlackBerry. Great.

I managed to get the new operating system installed on my device... but of course, BlackBerry desktop was too stupid to realise that I'd done this because it had failed in the middle of the update the last time. Yippee.

It turns out that BlackBerry Desktop *does* leave a backup file around that you can use to restore all of your information... or so it seems. After restoring the backup I noticed that I had all my contacts, and settings... but no apps. All those applications I'd downloaded to my BlackBerry, that I *watched* getting saved in the backup process? Gone. Why? Guess RIM thinks it makes sense to store one half of your backup somewhere and the other somewhere else (and hidden). Brilliant thinking, here.

Why is this so upsetting? Well the Bold is supposed to have over-the-air update functionality. Does it? Anyone's guess... but if it does, RIM's sure done a terrible job taking advantage of it. What's worse is that my Kindle... a simple book reader, does OTA updates, and does them beautifully.

I was flipping through the "content manager" on my Kindle recently and realised the menus had a few new (and useful) features there. Where'd they come from? No idea. It seems my Kindle silently upgraded itself, and kept on working splendidly...

Even more a sign that RIM's tech is slipping behind is the fact that Android includes OTA update capabilities, and is actually using them. The first batch of G1 is supposed to get an OTA update, which, considering the device just launched is at once distressing and impressive.

Either way, anything's better than the invasive, time-wasting, multi-step, failure-ridden process that RIM's got going for it today... hopefully they've got some bright folks in Waterloo working on it.

How can Android win developers?

The first production Android device (T-Mobile's G1) will soon hit the market, and the legions of Google faithful will no-doubt snap up many devices in short order.

Will that be enough to allow Android to be a real competitor in the smartphone wars? The G1 isn't a particularly attractive device, doesn't have as good a media player as the iPhone, doesn't have a browser that can best the iPhone, doesn't provide eMail that holds a candle to BlackBerry, and is locked to a network that's widely regarded as having lackluster coverage. It's unlikely that the G1 is going to be a hit with consumers, and it's not going to ship in volumes that will make anyone at Apple or RIM lose sleep.

That feeds a bigger problem, though: getting developers on side. Unlike the iPhone which got great consumer demand without any third-party apps just by having a sexy device, or BlackBerry which has thrived by providing a rock-solid communications "appliance" that nobody's yet rivaled, Android is going to need to differentiate on killer 3rd party apps.

When it comes to developer platforms, iPhone has a beautiful SDK and distribution mechanism that's sparked widespread adoration from developers. Sure, Apple's exerting far more control on the developer community than perhaps they should, bit they're still a whole lot better than the existing carrier / OEM ecosystem. Also, iPhone is a single, consistent platform... a developer can build one app and have it reliably run on the millions of iPhone 2G, 3G and iPod Touch devices in market. A great, powerful developer toolkit, robust operating system, ubiquitous distribution platform, and consistent device hardware? This is a developer's dream.

The BlackBerry developer platform isn't particularly elegant, doesn't have a great development environment (RIM just recently got decent Eclipse integration), and is a generally underpowered OS when it comes to doing anything involving graphics or media. It's also got a pretty significant number of inconsistencies between OS and hardware versions, which has proved to be an irritation for many RIM developers. It's particularly telling that RIM wrote the Facebook app for BlackBerry, whereas Facebook built their own iPhone app.

That said, BlackBerry provides a reasonably reliable and stable operating system, and millions of devices as an addressable install base (with users who have a disproportionately high usage of data and third party apps vs all the other platforms except iPhone). This makes it a no-brainer for many application developers to target.

So a developer just developing a new application will probably build their first app on iPhone, do a re-write in Java to support BlackBerry, and then give very careful consideration to whether they feel like building an app for Symbian or Windows Mobile. In a competitive marketplace, it's safe to say that if you can hit 30-40MM devices by targeting iPhone and BlackBerry, it's unlikely that you're going to spend anywhere near the same resources to target a platform like Android with <1 MM. Those resources are probably better spent on building either for a platform like Symbian (with broad reach), or towards building version 2 of the iPhone/BlackBerry app.

What's Google to do? Well, how about building a porting toolkit? If a developer decides to build a BlackBerry application, they're already going to be creating a Java version of their application. If Google provided tools to help more quickly port the BlackBerry Java app to an Android Java App, that could significantly reduce the time and effort required to get an app on Android, making the business case for doing so much more viable.

Sure, some classes of apps that are really glued to the hardware (e.g. games), aren't good candidates for something like this, but those apps are in the minority. Also, while Android's Java implementation has all sorts of great features like 3D graphics, rich sound libraries, and more, BlackBerry doesn't, so any app that was a straight port from BlackBerry to Android wouldn't really show off the full potential of the Android platform. Not ideal. But if the porting toolkit were extended to quickly and easily add some of these richer capabilities into the resulting applications, it could prove a powerful motivator for developers.

The name of the game is addressable market, and it's clear that as the new kid in town, Google's got an uphill battle. With a far-from-inspiring first device, the battle's just gotten a bit harder. Taking advantage of the current strength of BlackBerry as a platform is one thing that Google can do to more quickly bootstrap their own developer ecosystem... which would be great for the entire industry.

Yet-another-iPhone request: handle the network gracefully

Wireless networks can be crap... they don't work, you can't get a signal, etc. We all know this. So why does iPhone not seem to realize this?

If you're in the middle of writing an email on the subway, you might get interrupted by two or three messages telling you that your phone can't connect to the network, activate EDGE, etc. Why? Why not just have a queue of pending network events, and handle them when the network's available, without bothering the user?

Also, if I've written a few emails while out of coverage that are now waiting to be sent, why doesn't iPhone immediately send them when it sees a network again? What purpose does waiting for the next-scheduled send/receive time serve?

iPhone being built on OS X is great for a tonne of reasons, but mobile just isn't the same, and little things like this are good examples of why BlackBerry's market share is climbing and iPhone's has been dropping for the last little while... it turns out that people care about this stuff.

Fingers crossed for a great new update on Monday at WWDC. :)

Unlimited travel... but not.

Air Canada stupidity, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So Air Canada is offering a flight pass for "unlimited" travel inside Ontario for $1100 for two months. Wow. That's $550/month for all the travel you want in the province. There aren't a whole lot of airports (their email suggests three), but at least you can spend the weekend in Ottawa / Toronto if you feel like it, or commute between the two for those with jobs that require it.

Except not.

The flight pass explicitly forbids travel between Ottawa and Toronto. So... you can go between Ottawa / Toronto and Niagara? Um. All of a sudden this seems like less of a deal.

What a fantastic way to excite and then tremendously disappoint your customers Air Canada. I wonder why ACE Aviation wants rid of you right now...

New York City launches a seed venture fund

New York City, with a number of local partners has launched a $2 million seed fund called NYC Seed that will make investments up to $200,000 in local startup companies. There's been much talk about the gap in funding between angel and venture capital, and being able to get a couple hundred thousand dollars could help a lot of companies fill that gap. In a city that's dominated by financial services, it might be interesting to see some of the hedge funds or investment banks put in small amounts of capital as LP's: conferences like Money:Tech are proving there's a lot of innovation in software in that space. Come to think of it, it's something else that cities like London, Toronto and Paris might want to think about for similar reasons.

Is creating a venture fund the best way for a region to grow it's tech sector? Not sure, but it's a great start. Is $2 MM enough to start a small seed fund? Well, there're a few good examples of small seed funds (Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC being one) that seem to make sense. Personally I'm quite skeptical of the seed-sized convertible-debt instruments that some VCs use to make early stage investments, so for me anything that helps fill that capital gap is an experiment worth playing out.

Ascendance Project in Union Square

IMG_0034.JPG, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

Great performance from Ascendance Dance Project today in Union Square. Basically it's beautifully choreographed dance, on a rock climbing wall... very cool and unique.

There're still doing a few more performances through the weekend, and it's definitely worth seeing if you can make it out.

iphone wifi needs smarts

Note to Apple: just being able to connect to a wifi network isn't the
same as being able to send and receive data across it. iPhone really
ought to intelligently test the wifi connection and switch to cellular
data if wifi isn't working properly. Having to go in to settings
multiple times a day to enable and disable wifi isn't much fun.

Next generation gaming... will iPhone lead the way?

Nintendo's DS has been breaking all sorts of device sales records since launching, and Sony's PSP hasn't done too badly either... but is all that about to change?

Over the next 12-24 months, the chipsets in high-end handsets are going to have graphics processing power roughly equal to or exceeding Sony's PlayStation 2. That's some serious power for a small screen. Devices like HTC's Touch Diamond and Nokia's Tube are all going to ship with high-res touch (multi touch?) screens, as well. So in the not too distant future we're going to have devices with lots of compute and graphics power, memory, connectivity, with beautiful screens and consistent interaction mechanisms (touch and accelerometers, for example).

What's held mobile games back for the last few years? Well, aside from the crapulence of the games themselves (I can't believe that Guitar Hero III Mobile actually wins awards... have you *tried* it on a BlackBerry? Ugh. It's embarrassingly bad.), it's not the easiest thing to go out and find a game. There's all sorts of operator deck nonsense that a user's got to deal with to actually find the game they want. Of course, that assumes that the developer/publisher has actually struck a deal with the operator in question, so that the game's even available for download. Yikes.

Oh, and between the limited storage on devices and the slow network speeds, it's unlikely that you'd be able to download a very large game w/ lots of rich images and sound... at least not unless you feel like receiving one hell of a bill for data transfer.

On the flip side, anyone can walk into a store and pick up whatever game they want for their PSP or DS... and you just pop in the cartridge and away you go.

How might iPhone change this? Well, first of all, the hardware's pretty good so the kinds of games you can develop are pretty impressive. Go ahead and compare something like Tap Tap Revolution (available through Installer.app for jailbroken iPhones) to Guitar Hero III Mobile and I'll bet you'll be impressed just how much better TTR is, even though it was built by one particularly bright 23-year old developer.

Secondly, discovery isn't a problem... just fire up iTunes and browse around the app store for something that catches your fancy, click-to-buy, and it's sucked down at broadband speeds to your computer and quickly sync'd to your iPhone.

Finally, dealing with one company (Apple) is a whole lot easier than dealing with 40 operators, and Apple takes 30% of the sales revenue, compared to 50-60% in some cases with certain operators.

So, the hardware's pretty good, the discovery problem's pretty well solved, and it makes life a whole lot simpler for developers large and small.

If nothing else, Apple's going to put a lot of pressure on the operators, but they're also going to push others like Nokia to execute and innovate on strategies like Ovi.

But how're Nintendo and Sony going to respond? Between Wiiware and the PS3 Online store, both companies understand the importance of game downloads and online purchases. But can they overcome the massive change in phone capabilities? Remember that DS is wildly outselling PSP, and DS has a comparative paucity of compute power: they've innovated (like Wii) on gameplay. Well, with the hardware being equal or better, and in your pocket anyway, are we looking at the end of the portable console market?

Great article on Atari games

Gamasutra's got a great article on the history and design of Atari games. Especially helpful for people like me, who don't know a thing about gaming :)

Getting Things Done with iPhone

So it's been a few days since I swapped out my BlackBerry for an iPhone, and one of the biggest iPhone omissions seems to be the non-existent to-do list. Exactly why such an important feature (and one that's built right into iCal on the Mac) got left out is beyond me... thankfully, though, there're a lot of alternative web apps for iPhone including Ta-da List and Remember the Milk.

Apparently the Omni Group are working on a version of OmniFocus for iPhone, which I'm sure will be fantastic, but since I'm using both a BlackBerry and iPhone, Remember The Milk seems like a better choice (MilkSync lets you synchronize tasks to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device). That said, with all the great things I've heard about OmniFocus, I'm sure I'll give it a whirl when it ships for iPhone.

Experimenting with a different to-do list gave me a great excuse to start fresh with my task list and build a reasonably clean "Getting Things Done" setup. So here's my experience with getting a GTD solution up and working on iPhone.

First I gave Ta-Da List a shot, and while it's a great for managing simple task lists, it's not really up to the task of being at the center of your to-do list management. There's no ability to search tasks, move them from list to list, or use tags or any other mechanism to otherwise label things. If you're looking for a super-simple flat to-do list for your iPhone, though, it's great, and the site works great on iPhone and because it's so light weight things load super quickly, even over the EDGE network.

Next up (and what I'm currently using) is Remember The Milk. I've got to say it's more than a little intimidating at the outset... all these lists, locations, tags, smart searches, etc. It took me a while to decide on the simplest way to work with it.

What I ended up settling on was a set of lists for important projects, and tags for contexts (e.g. @computer, @ping, etc.)



Oh, there's another aside... @ping is my context for calling or writing someone. Since I'm always on a smartphone, I'm pretty much equally able to send an email or call someone, so I don't have @online / @phone as separate contexts to reach out to people.

I also especially like the smart search lists... For example the "High priority" list is just a saved search for any task with a priority of 1-3. This way on my phone I can just tap on that list to see the most important next actions across all my lists and contexts.

The homescreen on the iPhone version is great and shows you tasks that are due soon, which is always helpful.



Tapping on "Lists" shows you all the lists you've got set up, including your smart lists, and tapping on a list shows you all the tasks in a clean and simple view. From this view you can pretty easily complete or modify the tasks you've got. Of course, you can also navigate by tags from the homescreen if you (like myself) use them for setting task contexts.







Launching the browser on iPhone, and waiting for the not-so-fast EDGE network (assuming you've got coverage) isn't the most fun when you want to quickly jot down a note, so RTM also lets you send yourself an eMail that gets converted to a task and put in the "Inbox" list, where you can later re-file it. I often find this to be much easier than waiting for the browser/network/etc.

What's missing? While Remember The Milk seems to really take advantage of AJAX and JavaScript, to make most actions pretty snappy, it's just not the same as having a native app sitting on the phone. If Apple decides to implement HTML 5 offline storage or Gears, I really hope the folks at Remember The Milk take advantage of it. They've already done a great job of supporting Gears on the desktop website, so my fingers are crossed. On the other hand, I'd be first in line to buy a native iPhone version of Remember the Milk if they happened to come out with one.

Ultimately PIM tools are only good if they're easy to use and don't make you wait for them. Right now the mobile web isn't quite there yet, but until an offline/native version of RTM or another app comes out, I'm pretty happy with RTM for Mobile Safari.

iPhone 2.0 wishlist

I've played with iPhone off and on ever since it launched, but this week I finally decided to swap out my BlackBerry and start using iPhone exclusively (more on why later). The brilliant browser, great media support, and gorgeous fonts/display make a huge impact, but there're a lot of things missing from iPhone that makes it a less-than-perfect experience, and leaves me longing for my BlackBerry pretty frequently.

So, as I'll be eagerly awaiting the new iPhone software at WWDC, here's my short wishlist for the next couple revs of iPhone software.

1. Copy and paste. Yes, everyone's mentioned this already... but creating calendar events is a pain when you can't just copy-paste straight from an email.



2. Search in the address book. Scrolling through the address book is probably okay with a couple hundred contacts, but is pretty laborious with a couple thousand.



3. Faster auto-complete in email addresses. iPhone is strangely slow when it comes to being able to search through your address book when you start typing a recipient's name for an email.



4. Faster SMS. Loading the SMS chat screens seems to be quite slow on iPhone.



5. Better eMail UI. I've got three email addresses set up on iPhone. The number of taps to see a message is enormous. Home -> Mail Accounts -> Chosen Account -> Inbox -> Message is annoying and slow. Single inbox like BlackBerry, please.



6. Signatures for each account. So each email address should have it's own signature, instead of the one global email signature. A requirement if you've got corporate and personal mail on the same device.



7. It would be great if iPhone could extract contact and event details straight from an eMail just like Mail.app does on Leopard.



8. Info on the lock-screen. I shouldn't need to slide to unlock and then enter my PIN just to find out if I have any new mail or not. It'd be great if the lockout screen showed missed calls, SMS and eMail.



9. To-do list. A striking omission.



10. A better calendar. Yikes... entering calendar events on iPhone is a chore... can't click the time I want straight on the screen. There's no weekly view (a shame, as it'd look great in landscape view on iPhone). Events don't support time zones.



11. Working push. The Yahoo! Push solution has been (for me) very flaky and far from a reliable push experience. I hope this gets solved for the next rev. Integrating push for GMail would also be lovely :-)

Maybe a hard-button or two on the casing wouldn't be such a bad thing either. I love the minimalist design of iPhone, but a couple extra hard-buttons might make it a whole lot easier to get to your favourite apps, and that can't be a bad thing.

Fingers crossed ... just a couple weeks till WWDC :)

Taking ownership of your product

I'm sitting here on hold with O2, because RIM refuses to take ownership of their product. One of my eMail addresses (hosted by Google and pushed via RIM's BIS product) hasn't been working properly for days. I've sent RIM an email to support... and their response is:

As we indicated previously, your service provider is your first point of contact for support. BlackBerry Technical Support is available 24/7 if your provider needs to escalate the issue.

If you would prefer fee-based support from Research In Motion, please dial the appropriate telephone number below and enter option 3 in the phone menu.

So I call O2 from my BlackBerry... and after ages of voicemail hell finally get someone. Guess what? They can't help me. They need me to call back from another number. I said "well, why don't I give you a number and you can call me back?" Apparently they could take up to 48 hrs (!?!?!?) to call me back. Really.

So, fine... I'll bite... what's the number I should call? Some 0870 number (i.e. a TOLL NUMBER!). O2 has the NERVE to charge me for calling them for support!?

Thankfully SayNoTo0870.com had an alternative free number that I could use to call them back (no thanks to O2).



Once I finally got through the second round of voicemail hell, the first-level O2 support person had the nerve to say "Oh... the problem you think you have, isn't possible." Really?! So I'm just imagining this, huh? Please.

After assuring support that I wasn't patently insane I got pushed to a support engineer... a nice enough guy who spent over a half hour coming to no particular conclusion.



Which circle of Hell did Dante reserve for this?

Is it so hard to believe that a company like RIM should actually provide support to their consumers, especially given their huge consumer marketing push of late?

Is it such a great expectation to think that O2 might not want to charge customers for calling in for support?

Sadly leaving Orange

Looks like I'm making the switch from Orange to O2 (way better BlackBerry data plans - especially for frequent travelers - and they've got EDGE).

I was impressed at how easy they were to deal with. Less than 5 minutes on the phone and they claim to be sending a letter with my porting code.

Almost makes me wish I chose to stay. Too bad about the data plans. :(

The downside of getting to zero

I've been using a mail filter to help me manage my inbox for the last week or so. I'm already wasting way less time each day just handling email... and find myself needing to look to my BlackBerry far less.

The downside? Not nearly as much to churn through in the tube anymore. :).

Back to audiobooks, I guess.

Heating and Cooling ... from the street

Arian de Bondt, an engineer at Ooms, came up with a great idea. Use the heat generated by the sun on the road in summer to heat water that you'll later use in winter to heat a building and melt road-ice... then use the cold water that comes out of this process, store it again, so you can use it in summer for cooling.

Very cool.

Reminds me of the water cooling project in Toronto that uses lake water to air condition buildings... but even smarter. Well, if you've got an aquifer on hand :)

Via The Economist

Great service from an Apple Genius.Great service from an Apple Genius.

The battery life on the 15" MacBook Pro isn't awful, but it certainly isn't fantastic. So like many owners, I've got a spare battery... actually, I ordered it with the computer! Recently, one of the two batteries has been doing something very strange: As the battery gets nearly completely drained, the machine turns off. It doesn't go to sleep. It loses power and turns off. (Like pulling the plug on a desktop computer.) Not very nice. Worse still, there's still some charge left in the battery, so it could have made it to sleep without issue.

I wandered into the Apple Store on Regent St., mentioned this to one of the Geniuses, and a few minutes later he commented that while they couldn't find any similar reports in their tech database (gotta' love being unique, I guess), they were just going to swap out my battery for a new one. So now I have two properly working batteries, and no fear of my machine randomly turning off anymore.

All in all, I'm pretty impressed, not only with the care I received, but that someone in a store was able to make a decision to fix my problem, instead of saying something like "Sorry sir, we haven't heard of this problem before... so we can't really do anything about it," or asking to take my laptop away for a few days of diagnosis.

One more happy Apple customer.

Big brother Blyk

Join – Blyk UK, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So, looking at the Blyk signup page ... they really care about deeply authenticating who their subscribers are. This is actually pretty creepy. First it asks you to put in your name, and address. Nothing surprising here, right?

Well, it turns out if you're not on the electoral record (yes, they check the electoral record !!!) you get to provide either a drivers license or a passport number to prove who you are.

So what's this creepiness about? It's a free, ad-sponsored MVNO for youth (16-24). Is this about authenticating someone's age? Want to make sure they qualify for using Blyk, or so they can provide true demographic info to advertisers?

Isn't there a less disturbing way of doing this than using government databases, or supplying government ID?

Or is there another reason Blyk wants to truly verify who you are?

The idea that there's far more security around this than picking up a prepaid SIM at any highstreet retailer seems a bit odd, so I'm curious what it's all about...

Either way, it gives me the creeps.

Moving to where the money is...

Over on TechCrunch UK, Mike Butcher wrote a post about VCs and geography.

The article centers around an email a TechCrunch reader wrote to Mike...

Hi Mike

I am just dropping you a quick email to help expose what I think is a serious issue with the UK tech industry. As a developer I have been working on a web based product for over a year. There is a huge (untapped) market for this product, it requires minimal overheads and has potential for a massive amount of growth.

So, what’s the problem you may ask?

Unfortunately I am based in XXXXX, which has virtually no VC organisations. Therefore I am having to approach VCs in London. The problem is that they do not have the slightest interest in talking to people such as myself, unless you are refered to them or meet them personally. This is a very big problem from my location! I am taking the time to travel to London in November, but getting VCs to meet you is an even bigger problem.

I’m sure you have lots of other issues and topics to address, but people in this industry exist across the country and its very hard for us to break into the market.

The author of the email certainly sounds like he means well, and who could blame a guy for taking a shot at VCs? :-) ... but in reality, VC's aren't that hard to reach. Their associates are at every event around, for starters... and warm introductions aren't that hard to get: VCs are pretty networked people, so finding a few mutual connections can't be that hard. LinkedIn is a terrific way to connect with VCs as well, if you can't think of anyone who might be a connector.

But even beyond that, a well written pitch email will get you in the door of any VC in the land. Really. Sure, VCs are busy, and you'll hear the bit about getting hundreds of business plans that they can't read. Yup. Business plans. Send anyone a 30-page tome, and you're unlikely to get a lot of responses... but send a well-crafted paragraph or two, and you will get meetings.

The second bit, about only doing local deals... that bit's more difficult. If the company's super early stage, and there's not a lot of experience in the team, then yeah you're going to have people only wanting to do local deals. As the companies get more mature, and the teams more experienced, VCs tend to do deals that are further and further away from home. It's got nothing to do with just wanting to do local deals, and everything to do with wanting to be able to keep an eye on your companies, and help them where you can.

It's the reason Y Combinator gets their startups to move to where they are for a summer.

There're always exceptions to this, but if you're starting a company, and you're committed to it, and you've got a wholly young / inexperienced team, then pack up and move to where the investors (and more importantly the other startups) are... whether that's moving from Memphis to San Francisco, or Leeds to London.

At Web 2.0? Check out Mobile 2.0

Dan Appelquist and friends at hosting a great Mobile 2.0 conference alongside O'Reilly's web 2 conference in SF next week. If you're in town, check it out, and have a look at Dan's about it.

I heart Mozy.

Mozy Backup Status, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So, these guys got bought by EMC recently (congrats!)...

How cool is it to have your computer securely backed up somewhere off in the cloud, with no effort? I wander off for dinner, get back and ... oh... my machine's backed up. Thanks for letting me know :-)

Now that Mozy's proved reliable backing up my work and mail, maybe I'll just let it back everything up...

Mippin goes live

Prashant and the folks at Refresh Mobile just launched Mippin an in-browser RSS reader (so there's nothing to install) that has all sorts of great features like posting an article straight to Twitter or texting it to a friend.

The media transcoding works pretty well, and lets you read blogs without the crummy experience you'd traditionally expect from a WAP site. It's particularly slick on 3G/HSPA connections with a good browser...

If you've got a decent phone, and kill time reading blogs on your phone, Mippin's definitely something to try.

and I'm not invited?

Oh BlackBerry... I wonder what the snazzy VIP program is all about...

Getting to Zero

So, the empty inbox bit about GTD just feels wrong... plus it doesn't sync well to a Berry or other phone (where you really want all your mail in one place).

Here's my solution:



This way I get to look at one folder that always has the messages I have to "touch" in some way before it's been dealt with.