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Last week it was a great pleasure to attend Oxford University’s Future Technology Conference. Hosted by Peter Holand, Ajit Jaokar and Tomi Ahonen, the event brought together over 70 people from all over the world, coming from as far as the U.S. and South Africa.

Unlike other conferences that mostly focus on presentations from new startups in the mobile domain, this conference had a much broader spectrum, which was reflected by the many refreshingly different topics presented during the day. Below are a couple of notes I took for contemplation. In addition, I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr.

Mark Selby, Vice President Industry Collaborations, Nokia:

• Mobile is about creating, consuming, interacting and connecting
• Berthold Brecht about the radio: It is nice that it is talking to me, but I would like to talk back.
  TV = unhealthy fixation with furniture
• DRM is a waste of time, people will always find a way around it. Social acceptance of ownership is necessary in the same way that it is accepted by most today that breaking into someone else’s house is not acceptable.
• Augmented Reality: I’ve reported about this before and Mark had a remarkably new application: What if you could point the camera of your phone towards a building and a server back on the Internet then recognizes the building and tells you about restaurants inside, apartments for rent, etc. In my opinion, still some years away, but I see a great potential here.

Jonathan MacDonald, Blyk:

• The ‘community’ doesn’t see themselves as the ‘community’. Everybody sees himself as an individual!
• The advocacy dial: ignore, review, engage, recommend
• Personal recommendation: The best form of advertising
• Offers solutions, not services

Niklas Blum, Fraunhofer R&D Institude FOKUS

• Reported on how to integrate web services with IMS. Interesting slides, my question, however, who integrates with whom, telco with web 2.0 company or vice versa remains.

William Volk, CEO NyNuMo

• Reported about service uptake of his games on the iPhone.
• Discovery is crucial and Apple did a superb job with application discovery for the iPhone.
• Since his games are browser based, they could be easily adapted to Nokia Nseries browsers.
• However, Nokia has no content discovery in place that comes even close to that of Apple.

Tomi Ahonen vs. Dean Bubley

• The great mobile debate: Will the future of the Internet be shaped by mobile, or is the PC still in control? Hilarious debate, no clear winner 

Simon Cavill of mi-pay

• Gave a great presentation about using mobile phones to send money between countries, mostly from immigration countries such as the U.K. back to Africa.
• I’ve reported about M-Pesa before, which is something similar but only on a national basis. This one works for sending money home, bypassing expensive services such as Western Union. Hopefully, his slides are put online by Forum Oxford.

Antonio Vince Stabyl – CEO of itsmy.com (Gofresh)

• Great presentation of his mobile social networking service.
• During the presentation, he mentioned that the service first became successful when it was discovered by users in the U.S. markets with reasonably priced flat rate mobile data.
• Virality kicked in when people having data flat rates recommended the service to friends.

Christian Lindholm, Fjord

• As always a thought provoking presentation around user interfaces.
• “Users only exist in mobile & the drug industry”

And that’s it for the roundup. Once the link to the presentations is available, I’ll put it into the comments section below. Thanks to Peter, Ajit and Tomi for the great event. Looking forward to an ‘encore’ in 2009!

About a year ago I figured out how to use a Linksys WRT54 Wifi router and Wireshark for Wifi packet tracing and reported about it here. Now I have found another inexpensive tool for the job, which is equally helpful.

Background: The problem with Wifi packet tracing and Windows is that the wireless card drivers do not report the Wifi specific headers and also can not be set into promiscuous mode, which required to pick up packets from other devices in the network. On Linux, things are a lot easier, as drivers forward the required information.

I recently bought a Linux based eeePC, for quite different purposes, but now stumbled over instructions how to make Wireshark work with it and how to set the Wifi chip into promiscuous mode. I gave it a try today and it works like a charm. I love Wikis!

Here are some additional hints I unfortunately can’t add to the Wiki as a login is required…:

• Starting with Wireshark 0.99.5, WPA decryption is supported with manual key input. Very helpful for tracing real networks. Note: While I have this version on my Windows PC, the Debian packet manager only installed 0.99.4 on the eeePC. As a consequence, I have to wait with WPA decryption until I open the tracefile on the Windows PC.
   
• For the WPA decryption to work (later on on the Windows PC), the eeePC’s network card needs to be set to a network without encryption before promiscuous mode is activated. Otherwise, the Wifi chip seems to reuse the previous encryption key and tries to decrypt the packets instead of delivering them as they are to higher layers.

I’ve already made some very interesting discoveries when tracing my N95 in idle mode with the SIP VoIP client active. Lots of power save, polling and other Wifi management messages going back and forth which can’t be seen when tracing the Ethernet layer only. More about that in a future post.

Every now and then I just wonder why Nokia just can’t their feet on the ground in the U.S. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that there is only T-Mobile and AT&T as GSM operators (plus a few small ones) and no direct sales channels or service providers like in many countries in Europe!? While the U.S. market is certainly big in terms of number of people, Nokia’s opportunities via only two carriers are rather small. Even if both worked with Nokia they can only address half the population, as the other half is with CDMA carriers. And if only one of those two doesn’t like Nokia (anymore), the opportunity is instantly cut in half. Compare that to markets such as Europe where there are at least 3 to 4 operators in each country. If Nokia falls out of favor with one of them, that’s not really a problem, there are so many more operators in so many more countries to do business with. O.k., it’s a lot of work to talk with so many operators but in the end it might greatly reduce their risk. And then there are the service providers in many countries or even laws that mobile phones must be sold independently from subscriptions. In countries where this is the case, Nokia depends even less on carriers.

Last year, people said the University of Oxford’s Future Technology conference was THE wireless event to attend in 2007 and I was sad to have missed it. Not so this year, as my ticket is booked and I am looking forward very much to an exciting conference day on the 18th of April.

In case you haven’t heard of the event yet, take a look at the official web site here. At last, I will meet Dean Bubley, Ajit Jaokar, Tomi Ahonen and Christian Lindholm in person, all speakers at the conference. Topics on the agenda range from Mobile Social Networking, iPhone Applications, user-generated content and advertising, mobile web 2.0 applications, mobile browser extensions, mobile search, etc., etc. I know Tomi and Dean sometimes have different opinions on a topic so I am especially looking forward to their debate 🙂

If you are reading this and planning to go to Oxford for the event as well, I am looking forward very much to meet you there!

In case you have to miss this opportunity, there are also a number of interesting telecom courses at the beginning of summer at the university which you might be interested in. In case you are in the WiMAX business, have a closer look at the 2 day WiMAX course that I will present together with John Edwards of Picochip and Chris Beardsmore of Intel.

Carlo Longino, probably known by many from his musings at Mobhappy, has recently started blogging for Nortel on the Hyperconnectivity blog. His topics are WiMAX and 40G optical. I just stumbled over it by accident and quite like what I have seen. Seems like a good move from Nortel to find some bloggers from outside the company to push their ideas in addition to blogs such as those from Nortel’s CTO John Roese and Phil Edholm.

Interesting also to see and to compare the approaches of different companies. Nokia’s S60, for example, is also doing lots of different blogs to reach out. Their approach is not from the top level or from the outside but from the people actually working on the products.

If you have recommendations of good blogs from people of other wireless companies please leave a comment.

I almost made it to the Plug.eu conference in Brussels last week but had to change my plans on short notice. Too bad, hopefully next year. One of the reasons I wanted to go was because Rudy de Waele of m-trends was talking about Mobile 2.0. He was already giving a similar presentation a couple of months ago at another conference and I found it very interesting and inspiring. Looks like he continued to keep his eyes and ears open in the meantime since his latest presentation contains a full update. Lots has happened in the past months! For all who are interested, here’s a link to the presentation. Don’t be afraid by the number of pages, it’s definitely worth the time!

Quite often I am using my N95 and a Bluetooth keyboard to respond to eMails and to write a blog entry such as this one. While it works quite well, I am really missing a good spell checking feature. I don’t think that’s to difficult since the dictionary for it is already in the phone for the T-9 functionality. Is this only a nice to have feature desired by few? What do you think?

In the future, we might see cellular networks tightly integrated into an overall fixed/wireless network concept and it won’t matter anymore whether a device uses Wifi or cellular network access. But this is definitely not the case today so bearer awareness in applications is a concept that remains neccessary for the foreseeable future. While I have already speculated about this concept in the past it is good to see that it is becoming reality. Let’s take some very data hungry applications I usually only use via Wifi on my Nokia N95 as an example. When I come home the phone automatically detects that my Wifi network is available which triggers a number of applications to jump into action. The SIP VoIP client automatically connects to the Internet and my phone becomes a Wireless/Cordless phone. Shozu connects to the Internet to upload the pictures I have taken to Flickr. And the podcasting application also detects that contact to the network has been reestablished and automatically checks for new podcasts in my favourite streams and downloads them automatically so I can listen to them next time I am out and about. And it all happens automatically. Depending on the country where I am at a particular time, I allow some of these applications to use the cellular network as well. That really depends on how far mobile network operators allow prepaid users to venture out into the Internet, both in terms of price and access restrictions.

Here’s a question for LTE Radio designers both on the network and the terminal side that I can’t find a good answer for in the documents I have read on LTE so far: In the 3GPP E-UTRAN standards documents, both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) is defined. It is often said that the implementation of the two different modes is very similar. Other sources point out that LTE will first be deployed in bands assigned for use with FDD. So I wonder if TDD will have a similar fate as UMTS TDD, which was specified, but never used on a large scale!? From my point of view, LTE TDD will only get a real chance if it is part of the first release of base stations and terminals. So here is my question: Does anyone know if TDD mode is part of mobile devices from day 1 and if so which market TDD mode addresses?

Recently I stumbled over this article on the web which says that SIM cards used in GSM and UMTS phones today might soon be extended with a USB interface. Two so far unused pins will be used for the purpose and make the enhancement fully backwards compatible.

A subsequent discussion with a SIM card expert revealed that the new USB 1.1 interface (up to 12 MBit/s transfer rate) can be used in three interface modes:

• Mass Storage: Despite their size, SIM cards can include several megabytes and potentially even gigabytes of flash memory today. In this mode, the mobile device can access the flash memory just like an external memory card today.

• Ethernet Emulation Mode (EEM): In this mode, the SIM card is accessed like a device on an Ethernet (i.e. via IP) and a web server could for example serve local content to the web browser running on the mobile device. Interesting for network operators to deploy SIM cards with content that can be accessed from the device with links to their offerings on the web.

• ICCD: In this mode, all files which are required for GSM/UMTS/IMS/LTE operation can be accessed as over the legacy interface.