Daniel a former student of mine in entrepreneurship courses at Telecom Paris launched its first venture : it’s called “SlashWars” and is a location-based role playing game in a very funny environment and leveraging on the built-in accelerometer to let you slash your opponents (see the screencast video below). With his team they built a complete universe and the result is really amazing.
Kudos to them!
They submitted their work to the SFR JTD contest due last week, wish their good luck !

Just spotted a new Framewwork for J2ME development called LWUIT which seems to have recently reached a certain level of maturity. Basically it focuses on the UI providing a swing-like model and enables to create a single jar running on a lot of devices (which is handy if you need to go through the Java verified process) and is pretty groundbreaking compared to good old J2MEPolish which generates a couple jar/jad per targeted device… It features :

• Swing Like MVC (Model View Controller)
• Layouts
• PLAF (Pluggable Look And Feel) & Themes
• Fonts
• Touch Screen
• Animations & Transitions
• Rich widgets
• 3D Integration (Optional)
• Painters
• Modal Dialogs
• External Tools
• I18N/L10N
• SVG Integration (Optional)

It’s released under GPLv2 with Classpath Exception which basically makes it free to use!

Announced today, the i7500 will be the first Samsung Android phone in the market, with a release date set in June for most EU Operators. Its main features, apart from a splendid design are :

• 11.9-mm slim
• quad-band GSM, tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA (900/1700/2100MHz)
• 3.2-inch, 320 x 480 pixel AMOLED touchscreen
• WiFi, GPS
• 5 megapixel camera with Power LED
• 1,500mAh battery
• 8GB of storage (plus MicroSD expansion for up to 32GB more)
• standard 3.5mm heasdset jack

No real keyboard on that one but hey it looks gorgeous, and the AMOLED display (Active Matrix OLED) is supposedly ultra-sharp and very low-power – hopefully will give an autonomy boost to the smartphone. Can’t way…

While I stopped playing WoW, can’t help but being amazed by this use of Vollee (previously featured as bringing Second Life to an iPhone & N95). Seems like Vollee and OnLive are heading in the same direction proposing cloud-based game rendering.

That’s a milestone worth mentioning – starts giving some real weight to the user base.
The G1 was put on sale on October’08 and if you consider that T-Mobile is one of the smallest carrier in the US that’s quite an achievement. Add to that the developer phones (ADP1) and the derivatives of the G1 being sold recently by other operators such as Orange and you’ll get a pretty nice start for Android!

Some of you might have heard it from me but I’m back in the mobile business. As such got new toys to play with ! Over the last 6 months I used as a personal phone an iPhone then and HTC Android G1 (ADP1) and finally a Blackberry Bold and I wanted to share with you my views on those devices.

Just to get an understanding on what’s important for me : I have 4 main email accounts all on Google Apps and I extensively use the specific GMail features such as Archiving and only keep on my inbox what needs to be processed. I never erase emails from the server and always deletes them from my mail clients inbox as they are being processed.
All my contacts and calendar are being pushed to my main GMail account and I expect this to be the center of my PIM Life.
I’m totally not into the music things and rarely store content on my phone, but I’m totally into IM (especially Gtalk) and using my mobile as a way of continuing the services I use on my desktop environment. As such here are my views on those 3 devices

iPhone Pros:

• Amazing app store – totally game changing in the mobile world
• Multitouch is perfect for maps and web navigation
• Amazing games
• Support for word and pdf files preview

iPhone Cons:

• No Push email except with mobile Me
• Can’t type on the soft keyboard – useless…
• no bg process (coming in 3.0) and no IM … totally unacceptable to have to wait 2 years for this to come
• Camera is a joke (totally useless…)

Conclusion : can’t use iPhone as a productivity tool – an iPod Touch would probably better

Android g1 Pros:

• Splendid Gmail support (push)
• Applications are really nice and android market has a lot of potential
• Lots of apps can run simultaneously without harming the device performances
• the keyboard is amazing
• Has a compass, the streetview demo rocks thanks to that
• Decent 2D/3D performances (not too many games here though)
• Touchscreen & Trackball support

Android g1 Cons:

• Only one gmail account supported – to get the others you need download an email client that has limited GMail support and polls the network killing your battery
• no multitouch support
• What’s with the USB headset plug !? HTC get real ! Use jack !
• The plastics doesn’t seem really solid, seeing baby open/close the keyboard always tends to stress me
• No native support for neither office files nor PDF files
• my ADP1 is banned from accessing most marketplace applications – Google guys find a solution ! can’t ban developers from getting their own apps !!!

Conclusion : almost there ! A few more releases and a phone made with better materials would make my day !

Blackberry Bold Pros :

• The push email works flawlessly in multiple accounts – the BB backend server is doing a fantastic job
• Keyboard is fine (though smaller than G1’s)
• Device design is amazing – it really feels good when holding it
• GMail and Google Sync support works flawlessly
• Plenty of apps polling the network in parallel don’t kill the device performance and life-span
• Out of the box support for all office files ( and ppt files look great on this)

Blackberry Bold Cons :

• No touchscreen (feels weird)
• Third party applications look really old and badly designed – not up to the level of iPhone and Android
• Keyboard lock process is complicated and unnatural if you’re not using the holster – which thickens considerably the already thick device

Conclusion : Probably the best productivity tool yet – lets me spend the week end without turning on the laptop and yet keeping the needed responsiveness. Would have loved touchscreen though and some better third party apps…

I tried Mafia Wars and am pretty impressed by the fluidity of the gameplay process, everything goes fast and you climb up the ladder of being a mafioso at a very fast pace. When you get enough experiment with quests (NPCs) it’s time to fight real players in PvP and each fight goes really fast… thus making it a really nice casual experience. Available cross-platform (started on Facebook), it’s really wort a try !

This is so cool! Well from a geek point of view at least, the iPhone is not doing much more than an RC remote – yet it’s so geek-ish !

Update: Apparently I was mistaken – it is a BlackBerry Storm, not an iPhone (man some people actually bought a Storm ? what’s th point in having a BB if there is no keyboard ?). Thanks Gabriel for putting this to my attention !

I wanted to subscribe a FTTB or FTTH offering – as I was investigating potential solutions I discovered that Neuilly was not connected yet… but some ISPs still were willing to sell me a Very High Bandwidth connection! After investigating I discovered that those crooks (Darty and Numericable) make a difference between the Very High Bandwidth offering which can be limited to 30Mb when no fiber is connected and the real offer with Fiber that goes up to 100M and gives a 50M Uplink speed (which is imho where the real interest is enabling new use cases such as giving live to my Steekr network drive account).
So be careful, their marketing is really aimed at deceiving you !
Note : Numericable is the more transparent here, as you can see at least they write in plain letters that bandwidth is being “up to 30Mb” – Darty makes no such mention on their site and you have to read the Terms and Conditions to get it – how lame…

WiiSpray Teaser from cldfx.com on Vimeo.

The WiiSpray project simulates every aspect of spraying. Contrary to what you would think the software is not running on a Wii but on a MAC thanks to the cool WiiRemote Framework used in DarwinRemote project. Take a few minutes to watch the video, it’s pretty amazing !