Category: Uncategorized

I first heard of a project at the University of Hagenberg to control an RC truck via an N95 over Bluetooth by using the N95’s built in motion sensor in a recent S60 podcast. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, the S60 marketing team gave a demo how it works in practice. Here’s a YouTube video showing how Oren Levine controls the truck. Very impressive!

Once the Nokia N96 hits the shelf it will probably be one of the first DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast – Handheld) devices being shipped in large numbers. Not that DVB-H capable handsets haven’t sold for about two years now. However, DVB-H is only available in a few European countries such as Italy, and reception is not free. Maybe it is this fact coupled with licensing issues and access to the required spectrum that prevents mobile TV from taking off?

T-Mobile and Vodafone might think just that and have decided to launch DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast – Terrestrial) capable handsets before the European football championship this year. The advantage: The DVB-T receiver in the mobile receives the non encrypted standard digital television signal for TVs. No subscription is required and there are no doubts concerning the programming, since users know it from their TV set at home.

Note that opening up the mobile platform to receive standard terrestrial programming is nothing new. In Japan, mobile TV seems to be quite popular, maybe just because among other things, there is also no subscription required to receive the program via the 1seq, the technology used there.

Critics say the DVB-T receiver chip is likely to consume more energy than the mobile optimized DVB-H chip. That’s probably true but the big question will be if it really matters…

Geocaching has become almost a mainstream hobby these days. So on a previous weekend, I gave it a try to find out what this is all about. As I don’t have a dedicated GPS device, I wanted to use my Nokia N95 with the built in GPS receiver for the purpose. With a quick search I found exactly what I needed for the purpose: "Geocache Navigator" by Trimble. The software is free if you can live which an occasional advertisement, of which I haven’t seen one yet, though.

Strangely enough, the Geocache Navigator is a Java based program but seems to have been specifically developed for Nokia Nseries phones with a built in GPS API. I tried the program both with the built in GPS receiver and my external GPS Bluetooth mouse and it just works fine.

A "cache" can be hunted in several ways with the program. Either you use the program to find starting points for caches around you including instructions what to do at each waypoint, or you use the PC to  visit a geocaching web site such as www.geocaching.com, locate a cache and print out the instructions. I preferred printing out the instructions to downloading them to the program.

Despite the program requesting access to the network, it’s not required if the instructions are printed out beforehand. In this case, however, the GPS co-ordinates have to be typed in manually. As you can see in the second picture on the left, I managed to find my first cache 🙂

For a visual explanation of how the program works, have a look at Trimble’s video that shows how the program works. Very nice, it won’t be the last cache I’ve hunted 🙂

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?