Archive for November, 2006
Tchernobyl in your mobile
I got pretty amused to see that Clarins, a French beauty group will be releasing in january a new product aiiming at protecting your baby skin from naughty Mobile phone radiation. The cream will:
“The spray contains molecules derived from microorganisms living near undersea volcanoes and from plants which survive in extreme conditions such as alongside motorways and in Siberia.”
Funny … and it’s not even April 1st.
Freescale’s Windows Vista companion Reference Design
This is quite a strange title isn’t it? What has Freescale to do with Microsoft ? The answer is pretty easy : it just released a reference design for a bluetooth companion device. Basically it will look like a tiny PDA running Windows CE + Microsoft SideShow dev.Kit and connected through BlueTooth to your laptop and where you will be able to see, for instance, the slides you are presenting, letting you scroll through them. This will also let you command a bunch of other Vista features.
Asus will be presenting a first implementation of that at CES in january (I’ll be there).
WiFi Media streamer
I’m kink of disappointed from my Kiss DVD Player. Indeed, many codecs aren’t supported and WiFi is working pretty badly, so I was looking for something that could handle all my movies storage and if possible, even manage their downloads. I guess I found it on Engadget with Mvix MX760HD. It’s a WiFi HD + embedded Linux OS, so I guess someone will hack it and insert a bittorrent client inside (btw bittorent just raised 25M$ and Bram Cohen quits).
Technorati Tags: linux, media center, wifi
Bluetooth VoIP Gateway
I just spotted on engadget a Bluetooth VoIP Gateway. It’s funny as at Wavestorm we have been working on a similar internal project and decided to kill it before prototype stage. Indeed it appeared that you had to install an application on you mobile to connect to the gateway, ant this application had to be able to access microphone and speaker… so that basically limited the compatible handsets to Windows Mobile and Symbian. In that case clipcomm only supports Windows Mobile. Moreover, those high-end phones will soon all support WiFi… thus bluetooth was no real need… I’d prefer being able to use bluetooth with my BT Headset instead that using it for data call.
So we decided that this was only a very short term issue and that could only address a very limited market … what do you think ?
Nabaztag raped
Just found an opensource project that reverse-engineered the protocol used by the Nabaztag to talk with Violet’s servers enabling the hackers to feed it directly with instructions without needing a connection to the main server. I’m always amazed to see how good geeks are !
Technorati Tags: nabaztag, opensource, opensource, hack
Mobile TV study in Corea
In September 2005 a team of researchers from Nokia Cui Yanqing, Younghee Jung and myself worked with students and a professor from Yonsei University’s HCI Lab - Boreum Choi, Jinwoo Kim, Inseong Lee and Jieun Yoon to conduct a field study in Seoul, South Korea to explore actual usage of TU Media’s (then) recently launched broadcast Mobile TV service. Check out the full study it’s really full of insights about Mobile TV.
Flickr mobile
It’s been announced yesterday on Flickr’s blog, Flickr mobile is now back online at http://m.flickr.com/. Do not hesitate to click on the URL from your PC, it’s working just fine 
Strong presence of WaveStorm @ Infosecurity
Our distributor, Computerlinks has really done a great job in organizing its presence along with its partner’s at the Infosecurity exhibition in Paris. It’s quite easy, from the very first moment you entered the main hall, you couldn’t miss it! A huge flag with the WaveStorm logo embedded ;). We animated a keynote session about WiFi management systems (security, billing, access control for SMBs, Operators, and corporations) which was really a success being the third most attended session of the exhibition. Hope we get good feedback ! Anyway we already found many business opportunities 
Technorati Tags: computerlinks, infosecurity, wavestorm
Swisscom labs
I just discovered in 01 Informatique that Swisscom has released an online customer survey service called Swisscom Labs. 01 reports that the server is mainly using open source software, which emphasis that even in the operator’s walled garden, OpenSource has really acquired a strong legitimacy. This got obvious with the successes of IdealX, Linagora …
Anyway I’m amazed that there is such a lack customer surveys, focus groups and interaction with the end user. It seems that telecommunications in general is really an engineer business where marketing and understanding the customer’s needs are really taken into account too lightly.
Swisscom’s proposes to :
In Swisscom Mobile Labs youll find selected “beta products” to try out freely. As a rule these are already functional, but usually just to a limited extent.
Monitor our product development as of now and tell us your opinion! Been waiting long for one of the services? Or have an idea how to improve a product? Your open and honest feedback will help us to tailor products exactly to your requirements.
Downloading and using the “beta products” from Swisscom is free in the majority of cases
The first trial is about 2d barcodes, a mobile music community, the vodafone! live download bar … and the customers and beta testers are encouraged to give their feedback. Nice !
Technorati Tags: mobile, technology, marketing
Where is the mobile killer application ?
I was just wondering… did anyone see the killer application all the mobile operators where awaiting ? I remember that 2 years ago the mobile community & music application we designed at M-Distrib was considered a killer app, but even if we failed at raising enough funds to launch it (at that time there was no mature technology such as Flash Lite or Streamezzo we had to port to every handset manually) there still isn’t any successful example of such an application yet.
Mobile TV has been a huge buzz but at the end of the day ( and at the end of the free trial period) people stop using it. Mobile games have become common, such as rigtones and are driving a nice revenue but no innovation is coming from there. 3G visio is no use. Never got a visio call 
. Man, I’m getting disappointed !
I guess we are far from the market maturity we could have expected, at the end of the day the end user still thinks a mobile phone is only good for giving phone calls… and sending SMSes… I guess Google was right to consider himself in no rush to propose a mobile version of its services.
